Does the bureaucracy move the needle on trust: An exploratory analysis

A large assumption is that attitudes towards government, including perceptions of trust, are shaped in large part by experiences with or attitudes towards administrative institutions. In effect, we assume that the bureaucracy moves the needle on trust. This often leads to calls to reform the bureaucracy to ultimately improve trust in government despite limited empirical evidence to show that this is indeed the case. The purpose of this research is to systematically explore this assumption. Using a multi-method approach, including both a survey experiment and longitudinal analysis of aggregate public opinion, the results show that the bureaucracy does effect trust in government.;In the survey experiment, subjects are exposed to cues about agency performance as well as cues about agency salience and alignment with the partisanship for the presidential administration which may moderate the performance-trust relationship. The results show that a cue about poor performance decreases trust while a cue about good performance does not increase it when compared to a control group that received no treatment. Further agency salience and partisan alignment did not moderate this effect. In the longitudinal analysis, aggregate attitudes towards the bureaucracy are shown to constitute a significant reservoir of positive evaluations of government. Macro-level attitudes towards the bureaucracy do forecast short-term changes in trust and are comparable in magnitude to effects for an institution like the Congress. However, they do not affect trust in the long-term. Taken together, the results from both the survey experiment and the longitudinal analysis show that the bureaucracy affect trust in government. However, they also demonstrate that reforming the bureaucracy is not the way to enhance or restore trust in government.