Declining trust in governance is front of mind for many Americans. Recent actions and issues continue to exacerbate the issue. From the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in local communities to the establishment of data centers in the backyards of communities to government shutdowns and political polarization, tensions are high and trust is under threat.
By the end of 2025, according to Pew Research Center, only 17% of Americans reported trust in the federal government, with trust slightly higher at local levels. But what really is government trust, and how do people understand what it means?
Joe Hamm is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the College of Social Science. His expertise centers on how government and the public relate to one another, particularly how trust is built, monitored and sustained. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Trust Research.
Here, Hamm answers questions about trust in government, including how it affects government efficiency and how to mitigate and reverse declining trust.
What topics do you explore in the Journal of Trust Research?
One of the most fun parts of studying a fundamental human concept like trust is all of the facets of life that it intersects with. Pretty much every social question you can think of has some nexus with how we think about our potential for experiencing harm and, as a result, people have been writing about trust for a long time. As those lines of thinking developed, they started to create pockets of literature where people knew the work from that perspective well but were increasingly isolated from the other pockets.
Our vision for the Journal of Trust Research is to provide a place for authors to bridge those gaps by inviting scholarly writing from any discipline using any method, as long as it is accepted by people working in that space. That means that some of our papers address specific questions in specific contexts using specific methods that address questions of public administration, justice system legitimacy, organizational behavior, natural resource management, and close relationships. Other papers though take a more integrative view and either work to bridge those research areas or to boil trust down to the essential elements that always matter.
What explains declining government trust?
This question is hard to answer directly, primarily because there is some debate about whether trust in government has declined overall. There are certainly surveys that find drops in some areas, but we also find strong increases in other places that could just suggest that our trust is being redistributed rather than simply declining. What is clear, though, is that we are seeing shifts in relationships with trustees (that is, the person or group we place our trust in) that, in the past, we could assume most people would (or would not) trust. There is this common sense that there was a time, not so long ago, when most people assumed that most governmental organizations had their best interests at heart. What’s important to remember though is that, for many people, there has always been reason to question whether even the most uncontroversial parts of our government really had their interests at heart. So, the issue is not so much whether we are in a totally new world of precipitously declining trust, but who is questioning whether it makes sense to trust which parts of government and why. Why, during the COVID-19 pandemic, did so many people worry about being harmed by public health agencies efforts and why, now, is there so much concern about harm from Immigration and Customs Enforcement?
From a trust perspective, then, the heart of the issue is our sense for whether these organizations understand and are willing to protect us from the harms we are vulnerable to, and that points to two problems that help to explain where we see the biggest decreases in trust.
One is to be mindful about what we know about these organizations. Most of us rely on others’ experiences and media sources as our primary way of making sense of whether any government organization is worthy of being trusted. We have to remember though that both of those sources are socially constructed spaces that are susceptible to all kinds of human and algorithmic bias. It takes real work to practice good information hygiene and to avoid echo chambers that just reinforce our pre-existing perspectives and the outlets that focus on profiting from our attention.
The other piece of this, though, is the extent to which those organizations actually understand, and are doing an effective job in managing, the important vulnerabilities that we feel. When government takes on the wrong issues or uses inappropriate means to achieve them, it runs a considerable risk of causing more harm than it fixes. Engaging the public to truly understand the most important issues and the least harmful ways of addressing them is important but balancing across competing issues demands more than attending to the loudest voice. Just now, there is a real need to attend to the ethical and moral boundaries of good governance.
Why is trust important for government efficiency and effectiveness?
The primary role that trust plays within society is the management of vulnerability. We all live in a world where it’s almost always possible for someone else to make a decision that could cause us harm: We are all, almost always, vulnerable to some kind of harm from something. While we likely have some sense of how to keep ourselves safe from some of those harms, our increasingly complicated world includes harms that are really more than any one person can manage. The primary role of government, then, is to collect the expertise and resources we need to tackle the big threats we can’t manage on our own. In general, government agencies are better equipped to handle pandemics, droughts, earthquakes, inflation and social disorder, but entrusting them with those vulnerabilities carries its own risk. Governments can cause harm, not only by under- and over-reacting to the core issue, but also by negligently or intentionally causing unrelated injury. So, rather than eliminating our vulnerability, entrusting it to government makes us vulnerable to how they do their job, and when we trust them, this works well. We are, generally, more willing to work with them, to make sure they have the resources they need, to comply with their orders and requests and, even, to simply leave them alone to do their job.
What benefits arise from government showing its own vulnerabilities?
One important element of trust that often gets ignored when we talk about government is the fact that it goes both ways. When we talk about public trust in government, we often skip over the need for government to trust the public. So, while it is certainly different from the vulnerability that the public experiences, government is also vulnerable. In an abstract sense, all democratic governments are vulnerable to their publics as the source of their power, but there are also much more practical concerns. People who choose to work in government often derive an important part of their self-concept from the idea that their work has a positive impact on society. This can create a salient vulnerability to what the public thinks of them that can be experienced in one-on-one encounters.
When they are not managed effectively, these vulnerabilities can create a bit of a deadlock as members of the public and government representatives engage in a ‘race to the bottom’ where each is focused on protecting their own vulnerability and, in the process, is communicating that they are not willing to protect the other. Turning to an upward spiral of trust often requires that someone take a leap of faith, and government is often best positioned to do this. For all of its vulnerability, government is — almost universally — better equipped to manage threat than the public who often has far less experience with the issues, expertise in managing them, financial and legal resources to lean on, and even just enough time to meaningfully engage in the process. Government representatives who work in environments where they are professionally supported in learning to accept the right vulnerabilities at the right times can take important steps toward demonstrating that they are, themselves, trustworthy.
How can we protect and grow trust in public governance?
There’s a movement that some scholars call trust-by-trustworthiness that I have found to offer an important perspective on this question. Often when we talk about ‘fixing’ trust in government, we look first at what is needed to change how the public feels. I suspect there is some sense in thinking that a problem can be best addressed if we look to the people experiencing it but this approach — likely inadvertently — shifts the onus from the one responsible for managing vulnerability to the one who would (or would not) accept it. Trust-by-trustworthiness shifts this focus back to remind us that the core of being trusted is being trustworthy. Building trust in government requires a recognition that there are many in our society who do not experience government as worthy of being entrusted with their vulnerability. Being trustworthy is about demonstrating that government: 1) understands what the public feels vulnerable to and 2) is ready, willing and able to address that.
