Understanding Trust in Government: Environmental Sustainability, Fracking, and Public Opinion in American Politics

Growing disenfranchisement with political institutions and policy processes has generated interest in trust in government. For the most part, research has focused on trust in government as a general attitude covering all political institutions. In this book, Scott E. Robinson, James W. Stoutenborough, and Arnold Vedlitz argue that individual agencies develop specific reputations that may contrast with the more general attitudes towards government as a whole.

Grounded in a treatment of trust as a relationship between two actors and taking the Environmental Protection Agency as their subject, the authors illustrate that the agency’s reputation is explained through general demographic and ideological factors – as well as policy domain factors like environmentalism. The book presents results from two approaches to assessing trust: (1) a traditional attitudinal survey approach, and (2) an experimental approach using the context of hydraulic fracturing. While the traditional attitudinal survey approach provides traditional answers to what drives trust in the EPA, the experimental results reveal that there is little specific trust in the EPA across the United States.

Robinson, Stoutenborough, and Vedlitz expertly point the way forward for more reliable assessments of trust, while demonstrating the importance of assessing trust at the agency level. This book represents a much-needed resource for those studying both theory and methods in Public Administration and Public Policy.

Scott E. Robinson is the Bellmon Chair of Public Service at the University of Oklahoma. His research and teaching focus on the management of public service organizations as they cope with various forms of disasters or extreme events.

James W. Stoutenborough is an Assistant Professor at Idaho State University. His research and teaching interests include public policy, public opinion, and political psychology with a substantive interest in science and technology, environmental, and energy policy.

Arnold Vedlitz is holder of the Bob Bullock Chair in Government and Public Policy at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University. His teaching and research focus is on science and technology policy and environmental and natural resources policy.