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 detailed treatment in the nature of trust as a relationship between two specific 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 specific factors like environmentalism. For each set of variables, the book presents results from two approaches to assessing trust: (1) a traditional attitudinal survey approach, and (2) an experimental approach using the specific context of the emergence of hydraulic fracturing as a potential subject of regulation. While the traditional attitudinal survey approach provides traditional answers to what drive 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. A much need 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. He teaches class on grant writing and project management for charities, disaster politics and more general courses on managing public service organizations. His research has appeared in the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disaster and the Journal of Emergency Management as well as the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.

James W. Stoutenborough is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Idaho State University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Science, Technology, and Public Policy in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Stoutenborough's research and teaching interests included public policy, U.S. state politics, public opinion, and political psychology with a substantive interest in science and technology issues like climate change and renewable energy.

Arnold Vedlitz is holder of the Bob Bullock Chair in Government and Public Policy and Director of the Institute for Science, Technology and Public Policy (ISTPP) in the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University. He is division head for the Science, Technology and Public Policy Division at the Texas Engineering Experiment Station. He serves as a member of the Advisory Council for the Center for Transportation Safety and as a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Atmospheric Chemistry and the Environment. His teaching and research focus on science and technology policy, minority politics, public policy, inter-group conflict, American political behavior, urban politics, and political psychology.