In her new book, “Good Enough for Government Work,” Amy Lerman argues that the U.S. government faces a massive public reputation crisis. “The tendency of Americans to associate ‘public’ with ineffective, inefficient, and low-quality services,” she writes, “is a central feature of our modern political culture.” Even in the face of evidence to the contrary, many Americans assume that low-quality programs are government-run — and, conversely, that highly effective programs are private. This stereotype poses a serious problem for government: People are increasingly opting out of public services in favor of private ones, weakening government programs in the long run.
Lerman discussed her book in a recent phone interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. You compare the reputation crisis of the U.S. government to the kinds of reputation crises common in the corporate world. Walk me through this analogy.
A. In the private sector, a reputation crisis is when something happens that makes people think negatively about a particular company or product. This can be anything from a company introducing a low-quality product, to an ethical crisis, to a safety crisis or recall, but it’s some hit that the company takes to its overall reputation. This sets off a chain of events. When people start to have negative views of a company, they become less likely to buy things from it and more likely to start buying from competitors. The company then has to cut costs, which can reduce the objective quality of whatever it is that it produces.
In the public sector, we’re seeing something similar. Perceptions of government have become increasingly negative, and people who hold this negative stereotype of government have some predictable biases both in terms of how they update their views about what government does — they are resistant to the idea that government can actually produce high-quality goods — and they start to defect from government programs and services. When that happens, it becomes harder for government to deliver on its promise to provide high-quality goods and services.
Q. Skepticism about government is not new. The founders worried about big government, and the early 20th century saw the birth of modern-day libertarianism. What is different about today?
A. Americans have always had a healthy skepticism about government. But throughout American history, there have been periods when Americans needed government to solve problems and recognized that government played a crucial role. What we’re seeing today is that we have these huge problems, but people see government as part of the problem, rather than as a solution to it. There’s a bipartisan view of government as being fundamentally damaged and incapable of delivering solutions to the many problems that we face.
Q. Until the latter half of the 20th century, trust in government was relatively high, especially during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency and in the years after World War II. What do you see as the turning point?
A. I think it was a whole host of things. Even going back to the 1920s and ’30s, we see the beginnings of libertarian rhetoric that aimed to convince Americans that government was problematic, that it couldn’t be the solution to any problems, and that it wasn’t worth the trade-off with freedom and autonomy that was required to invest resources in an activist government. But going into World War II, we saw the expansion of social programs, a real need for government, and a lot of patriotism generally. And then the 1950s was the heyday of trust in government.
That starts to break down in the 1960s and ’70s. The typical explanations are some combination of Nixon, Watergate, the Vietnam War and racial conflict. All of these things come together in the ’70s and ’80s, where you see spikes in crime and real concern about the inability of government to deal with that. In the subsequent decades, you start to see both Democratic and Republican elites criticizing government, even if they are tempted to be part of government themselves. You see elected officials saying, “Government is failing you, and I’m going to help solve it.” This rhetoric is personified most intensely in Reagan. It resonates strongly with Americans because of our history of concerns about an overly active government. But it’s not limited to the United States: We see the same neoliberal rhetoric in the Thatcher era, as well. This is really when the roots of this take hold.
Q. In general, conservatives are more likely than liberals to distrust government. But you find that the relationship between partisanship and attitudes toward government is more nuanced than that.
A. It’s one of the most interesting aspects of the data that I looked at for the book. Obviously, Democrats and Republicans are ideologically divided over the proper size of government. Conservatives and Republicans are more likely to say that government should not play a role, and that it should be left to the private sector. But if you ask people whether they believe that government can accomplish its goals, or if government is competent and efficient and high-quality, you actually see a majority of Democrats holding similarly negative beliefs. If you ask Americans whether we should prioritize reducing the size of government or improving the efficiency of government, it’s amazing how large percentages of both Republicans and Democrats choose efficiency. The issue is that they don’t think government can improve. People are likely to say, “Well, it would be great if government could do these things, but since it can’t, we should downsize it.” That’s a different phenomenon than simply saying we should prioritize privatization and the market in the first place. In a time when we think of the defining feature of U.S. politics as being polarization, this anti-government rhetoric is bipartisan.
Q. You show that when people personally receive high-quality public services, they are more likely to mistakenly believe these services are privately provided. What’s going on here?
A. This is a persistent set of findings in both the experiments we ran online and in the field. I call it reputation-motivated reasoning, and it is a form of a much broader phenomenon of motivated reasoning, whereby people are more likely to seek out, retain and recall information that conforms to what they already believe. With reputation-motivated reasoning, people process information in ways that push them to become even more negative about government if they already believe that government is inefficient or incompetent.
So, for example, we ran a series of experiments, which I describe in the book, where we give people information about certain services and whether they are high quality or low quality, but we don’t specifically tell them whether the services are provided by a public entity or a private company. When we ask people to recall, they remember that the program is public if we’ve told them that it’s low quality, and private if we’ve told them that it’s high quality. They are inferring this information to conform to what they already believe to be true. And the reverse is also the case. If we tell people that something is provided by a private provider, they are more likely to remember that the service was described as high quality than if we had told them the service was provided by a public provider, even if we didn’t give them clear signals about what the quality of that service actually was.
Q. On the flip side, you’ve shown that positive personal experiences with government programs — public health insurance, for example — can “quickly and substantially improve” people’s attitudes toward major government programs like Medicare and the ACA.
A. People learn a lot about how government functions from their personal experiences with government. This happens in any number of ways, from going into a DMV office to participating in a public program. I find that when people have positive experiences with government — when they receive services that are really consequential to them and their families, benefits that they can identify as being provided by government, like insurance through the ACA or Medicare — they do update their views. What’s particularly interesting in the case of Medicare and the ACA is that we see these effects even among conservatives and Republicans. And even among conservatives and Republicans, we see effects among people who are anti-government in their attitude. The conclusion is that we can change these attitudes if people can be encouraged to identify the particular benefits they’re receiving from government that are meaningful and high quality. The irony, of course, is that when you have a public reputation crisis, people are less likely to take part in government programs and services, so they miss out on this opportunity to revise their thinking about what government has to offer.
Q. Given that irony, is there a way forward?
A. It’s such a hard question. To some extent, I think it’s about communication, and specifically about educating citizens about what government does and what benefits they receive from government. In the book, I talk about a series of tweets from [tax reduction activist] Grover Norquist, in which he describes taking his granddaughter to buy a guitar. She’s saved up money for the price of the guitar, but when she gets there, she learns she doesn’t have enough money because she didn’t understand that she’d have to pay taxes. Of course, Norquist concludes that this is how young Republicans are born. Thanks to the magic of Twitter, people quickly started responding to these tweets, asking whether he had explained to his granddaughter that taxes had paid for the roads they had driven on, the streetlights that allow them to see at night, the garbage collection. It’s important to educate people about public goods.
Q. It seems like part of the answer also has to be tackling the government’s reputation crisis writ large.
A. Absolutely. I would never say that government is doing a fantastic job at everything it’s trying to do. There are lots of places where government has earned its poor reputation. So the first order of business is making sure that government can be an efficient and effective steward of public funds.
