Declining Government Confidence and Policy Preferences in the U.S.: Devolution, Regime Effects, or Symbolic Change?

No trendin U.S. public opinion has elicited more enduring concern amongscholars, political commentators, andpoliticians than declining levels ofpublic confidence in the federal government. Motivated by the possibility that this decline signals a crisis of legitimacy orgrowing dissatisfaction with the overall direction of public policy, two generations ofscholarly debates have yielded three competing theoretical interpretations ofthis phenomenon. While they provide divergent answers toimportant questions about thedevolution ofpolicy-making from thefederal government to subnationallevels of government, competing hypotheses implied by these interpretations have not been successfully evaluated. We seek toadvance theory andresearch byinvestigating whether governmental confidence affects thepublic's willingness tosupport federal involvement within specific policy domains such as health care andeducation. Evaluating hypotheses implied bycompeting interpretations ofdeclining government confidence, wefind that the relationship between government confidence andpolicy preferences issmall andshows no evidence of trends. We discuss implications for competing interpretations of