Chicago Studies in American Politics

The Public Reputation Crisis in America (And What We Can Do to Fix It)

Amy E. Lerman

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226630342
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

American government is in the midst of a reputation crisis. An overwhelming majority of citizens—Republicans and Democrats alike—hold negative perceptions of the government and believe it is wasteful, inefficient, and doing a generally poor job managing public programs and providing public services. When social problems arise, Americans are therefore skeptical that the government has the ability to respond effectively. It's a serious problem, argues Amy E. Lerman, and it will not be a simple one to fix.With Good Enough for Government Work, Lerman uses surveys, experiments, and public opinion data to argue persuasively that the reputation of government is itself an impediment to government's ability to achieve the common good. In addition to improving its efficiency and effectiveness, government therefore has an equally critical task: countering the belief that the public sector is mired in incompetence. Lerman takes readers through the main challenges. Negative perceptions are highly resistant to change, she shows, because we tend to perceive the world in a way that confirms our negative stereotypes of government—even in the face of new information. Those who hold particularly negative perceptions also begin to "opt out" in favor of private alternatives, such as sending their children to private schools, living in gated communities, and refusing to participate in public health insurance programs. When sufficient numbers of people opt out of public services, the result can be a decline in the objective quality of public provision. In this way, citizens' beliefs about government can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with consequences for all. Lerman concludes with practical solutions for how the government might improve its reputation and roll back current efforts to eliminate or privatize even some of the most critical public services.
 

PART ONE

Foundations of the Reputation Crisis

ONE

The Public Reputation Crisis

If I ask you to imagine a typical public school in America today, what do you picture? For many, the images that most immediately come to mind depict some version of a large, worn-out building in a low-income area of a major American city. The school might be doing its very best to educate students, but it faces myriad challenges: teachers are underprepared and overworked; administrators are under-resourced and overwhelmed. Textbooks and equipment are outdated, and buildings and classrooms are falling apart.

Now, what if I ask you to picture a private school instead? Perhaps you imagine a neat set of buildings clustered around a small patch of bright green lawn. Kids in matching uniforms hurry to class, where enthusiastic teachers engage them in hands-on curriculum. Modern facilities house everything from a well-stocked library to a cutting-edge science lab, and full-time counselors are on hand to assist with college applications.

If these sorts of differences reflect your beliefs about public and private schools in America, you are not alone. When asked to consider what they know or have heard about how kids in the United States are educated, just 37 percent of Americans rated public schools as either excellent or good. The majority (61 percent) think of them as generally only fair or poor.1 In fact, roughly three-quarters of Americans (76 percent) give public schools across the country a C grade or lower, suggesting they view them as barely above the bar in terms of quality.2 These evaluations contrast starkly with perceptions of private school quality; more than twice as many Americans (fully 78 percent) rate the quality of a private school education as either excellent or good.3

In this book, I argue that the tendency of Americans to associate “public” with ineffective, inefficient, and low-quality services—and conversely, to connect “private” with effective, efficient, and higher-quality provision—is a central feature of our modern political culture. In fact, an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that government generally does not do a good job managing programs and providing services.4 As one conservative commentator recently opined, Americans understand the idea of a “technical team working ‘with private sector velocity and effectiveness.’ . . . No one would ever brag about working ‘with public sector velocity and effectiveness.’”5 In recent surveys, just 14 percent of Americans voiced their belief that government is effectively managed, and a meager 7 percent of Americans think government is either excellent or good at “spending money efficiently.”6

This was not always the case. In fact, according to historians, the phrase “good enough for government work” originated during World War II to describe the exacting standards and high quality required by government. By the 1960s and ’70s, however, the idiom was increasingly being employed ironically, in order to denigrate public-sector efforts.7 Today, “good enough for government work” has become familiar to the point of cliché, implying that something is of such extraordinarily low quality, it could only be acceptable in government.

This semantic reversal reflects a substantial transformation in our national perceptions of government: over the past several decades, a majority of citizens have come to believe that government is wasteful and inefficient, and that the public sector is incapable of offering services that are equivalent to or better than what the private market can provide. When social problems arise, Americans are therefore skeptical that government has the ability to effectively respond.

One striking feature of these beliefs about government is that they span the partisan divide. Despite deep ideological differences between members of the two major political parties in America today, both Democrats and Republicans hold consistently gloomy views of government. For instance, when asked whether government waste is a “major problem,” or whether “when something is run by government, it is usually wasteful and inefficient,” majorities across all partisan groups agree; in some recent years, partisan attitudes actually converge.8

We can see an example of this when we return to Americans’ perceptions of public and private education (see table 1.1). Republicans, on average, are about 13 percentage points less likely than Democrats to believe that the nation’s public schools provide a high-quality education. This is a slightly larger gap than the partisan differences in assessments of educational alternatives, including private schools, parochial schools, and charter schools, which are viewed more positively by Republicans by 5 percentage points, 8 percentage points, and 3 percentage points, respectively.9 However, differences in quality evaluations between Democrats and Republicans are dwarfed by Americans’ different perceptions of public school quality relative to the quality of each of these private alternatives. Public schools are consistently ranked as being of much lower quality than private schools (by 41 percentage points), parochial schools (by 32 percentage points), or charter school options (by 23 percentage points).

Table 1.1 Republicans are somewhat less positive than Democrats about public school quality, but all partisans consider public schools to be lower quality than private alternatives.

	Rep (%)	Ind (%)	Dem (%)	Total (%)	Difference (Rep–Dem)	Difference (option–public)
Private	82	77	77	78	5	41
Parochial	77	65	69	69	8	32
Charter	60	62	57	60	3	23
Public	33	34	46	37	–13	—

Source: 2012 Gallup News Service Social Series: Work and Education, http://www.gallup.com/poll/156974/private-schools-top-marks-educating-children.aspx.

It is true that many of our nation’s public schools are in serious trouble. Particularly in the most impoverished neighborhoods of large and diverse cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit, the plight of public schools has been well documented. The differences between public and private school quality are not that simple, though. There are also countless examples of high-quality public schools, both in these same large cities and spread across the country. School quality varies widely among private and charter schools, too. For instance, as a result of the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top,” nearly all states now have charter schools, but some of these schools are among the state’s lowest performing.10

In fact, studies of public versus private school quality find decidedly mixed results. A recent study by the US Department of Education comparing educational outcomes for kids in over 6,900 public and 530 private schools found that, after adjusting for characteristics of the students—such as gender, race/ethnicity, disability status, and ESL (English as a second language) status—there were no significant differences in reading scores by fourth grade.11 On mathematics, average scores for public school fourth-graders were actually higher relative to students in private schools, all else equal.12 This might be surprising to most Americans who assume that public schools, on the whole, are consistently outperformed by the private alternatives.13 As I argue in this book, though, negative stereotypes about public-sector incompetence and inefficiency systematically bias how individuals perceive government, even when public programs and services are objectively similar to or even of higher quality than the available private alternatives.

My intention in this book is not to suggest that government is without flaws; far from it. There is no shortage of examples highlighting problems with government waste, inefficiency, incompetence, and downright dysfunction. From the delayed response to Hurricane Katrina to the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act, from the Vietnam War to the 2008 financial crisis, from the Veterans Affairs hospital scandals to price escalation in military equipment acquisition, from interminably long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles to the shutdown of the Social Security website after regular business hours, from the Big Dig to the Bridge to Nowhere, American government has frequently earned its poor reputation.

My aim in this book is not to push back against this ample evidence. Indeed, I will argue throughout the following chapters that government must do more to ensure it is a wise and responsible custodian of public funds, and also that government would do well to get out of the way when private citizens left to their own devices can implement effective, efficient, and equitable solutions to the problems they face. Instead, my point is this: real and significant failures on the part of government have shaped citizens’ perceptions over the past half century—but in turn, citizens’ perceptions of government now have important effects of their own.

Anatomy of a Reputation Crisis

What has happened to American government in the eyes of its citizens can only be described as a profound public reputation crisis. In the corporate world, a reputation crisis is an event or a series of events that causes consumers to reconsider the value or integrity of a private company. Reputation harm can stem from any number of sources: a tragedy outside a company’s control threatens to undermine confidence in its operations (e.g., Johnson & Johnson takes a substantial hit after several deaths from cyanide-tainted Tylenol are reported); illegal or unethical dealings tarnish perceptions of corporate responsibility (e.g., Volkswagen struggles to appease customers and regulators after it is caught rigging its emissions systems); dissatisfaction with the quality of a particular product or service drags down the reputation of an entire brand (e.g., the British supermarket chain Tesco fights to reassure consumers after its beef burgers are found to contain large quantities of horsemeat). Generally speaking, though, a crisis event of some kind or another casts doubt on a company’s competence or ability, or calls into question its commitment to social responsibility.14 Whatever the catalyst, the initial reputational damage can have long-term and far-reaching consequences, resulting in lowered share prices, lost revenue, layoffs, or even bankruptcy and dissolution.

For a classic example of how a reputation crisis can unfold, consider the video game Pong. An incredibly simple, two-dimensional table tennis simulation, Pong was the first game developed by Atari, in 1972, and was one of the very first multiplayer arcade video games. Pong was introduced by Atari at a local bar called Andy Capp’s Tavern, and the fact that it could be played as a social rather than solo game made it an immediate favorite among patrons.15 As one of Atari’s founders noted: “It was very common to have...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• part one  Foundations of the Reputation Crisis
• part two  How a Reputation Crisis Unfolds
• part three  The Consequences of a Crisis
• part four  Rebuilding Reputation
• part five  Privatization and the Public Good
• Notes
• Index