{"id":19256,"date":"2017-11-17T08:14:04","date_gmt":"2017-11-17T13:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=19256"},"modified":"2017-11-17T08:14:04","modified_gmt":"2017-11-17T13:14:04","slug":"people-trust-authoritarian-governments-most","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=19256","title":{"rendered":"people trust authoritarian governments most"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Philadelphia) This Edelman international poll<\/a> shows that trust in government is low in most countries and declining almost everywhere. But five important countries stand out as exceptions. People trust the world’s largest single-party state, an absolute monarchy, a country in which one party has governed since 1959, a democracy with a very strong elected leader whom critics call authoritarian–and Indonesia, where a government<\/a>\u00a0chosen recently in a competitive election actually seems to be trusted.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I arrived at this graph from a piece by Ethan Zuckerman, who notes<\/a>, “Depressingly, there is a discernible, if weak, correlation (R2=0.162) between more open societies and low scores on Edelman\u2019s trust metric.”<\/p>\n

I don’t think we have long-term historical data on this question, but the pattern that Ethan notes is what I would imagine for the 1930s, when the European democracies were fraying and authoritarianism was on the rise. I didn’t expect to see it in my lifetime.<\/p>\n

Note also that the US actually scores above the OECD democracies on trust in government, surpassing states that (in my opinion) are governed in a more trustworthy fashion. This chart indicates that we can’t explain distrust in the USA by focusing on specifically American traits, events, or leaders: the pattern is global.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Philadelphia) This Edelman international poll shows that trust in government is low in most countries and declining almost everywhere. But five important countries stand out as exceptions. People trust the world’s largest single-party state, an absolute monarchy, a country in which one party has governed since 1959, a democracy with a very strong elected leader […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democratic-reform-overseas","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19256"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19271,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19256\/revisions\/19271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}