Why is the national mood and trust in government important for public policy?
Because, as Ralph Erber and Richard Lau, referring to David Easton’s work, state,
“the legitimacy of democratic political systems depends in large part on the extent
to which the electorate trusts the government to do what is right at least most ofthe time.”9 The trends reflected here suggest that, as of the end of 2009, Americans’
attitudes toward government are mixed, but remain guarded at best and negative at
worst. Furthermore, the data I show here do not reflect partisan differences. While
some social scientists and political commentators have argued that mass publics—
that is, large groups of people who identify with a common interest—have become
politically polarized, meaning that partisans’ attitudes move to the extreme ideological
positions of each party, recent research suggests that polarization is less a feature
of the political system than of “party sorting,” in which political parties become
more closely identified with ideologically grounded policy positions.10 This partisan
polarization contrasts with the 1950s and 1960s, when there were both liberal and
conservative Democrats, and liberal and conservative Republicans.