Rebuilding public's trust in government requires good governance and celebrating often invisible successes
The tricky thing about being a champion for good governance is that good governance is often invisible.
When roads are well maintained, when businesses in a community flourish, when hospitals and emergency services are trustworthy, and when drinking water is clean and safe, we tend to not think about it. There are no squeaky wheels to grease, so we take for granted the modern marvels of public administration.
To complicate matters further, most governance takes place outside of the explicitly political world that tends to make the headlines. Yes, legislatures pass laws, executives issue orders, judges make decisions, and diplomats negotiate. But public policy really happens through administration.
Education policy happens when a teacher grades a paper or disciplines a child. Immigration policy happens when a foreign service officer issues a visa or an Immigration & Customs Enforcement agent detains a migrant. Health policy happens when a nurse administers a vaccine, or a doctor recommends a treatment. Regulatory policy happens when an inspector certifies a restaurant or aircraft.
These routine but critical moments in public administration typically go unnoticed. It’s only when potholes proliferate, businesses shutter, emergency services face delays, or water is tainted and dangerous that many of us think about public administration at all. It’s unfortunate but it’s human nature. Psychologists call this tendency negativity bias. We’re hard-wired, it seems, to focus on the negative. There’s value to this cognitive bias. It’s how we identify dangers and collectively turn attention to pressing matters.
Much of my work as a professor in the UW–Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs focuses on water policy, and so the most egregious recent example of this for me is Jackson, Mississippi’s water crisis. Jackson’s plight is, at its core, a failure of governance. Leaders at every level were incentivized to ignore water infrastructure problems for many years until disaster ensued. Regulatory officials tolerated drinking water violations in Mississippi’s capital city for decades. When things came to a head last summer and water became truly undrinkable for a city of 150,000 where more than 80% of the residents are Black, national attention was rightfully aimed in the city’s direction. I can only hope the attention ultimately leads to a systemic overhaul that results in a clean, sustainable water supply for the residents of Jackson.
While we need to urgently identify and address critical breakdowns in public services, a major upshot of these crises is that they diminish the public’s trust in government. Things can then spin out in a vicious cycle that my co-authors and I discuss in our new book, “The Profits of Distrust: Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government.”
Countless invisible successes of public administration go unnoticed while the few failures are elevated, sometimes becoming self-fulfilling prophecies and leading to additional failures. This phenomenon can threaten the legitimacy of the government and the strength of our democracy. We’re seeing this play out currently. According to a policy poll we conducted at La Follette in 2021, 32% of Wisconsinites have little or no confidence in local government, 51% have little or no confidence in state government, and a staggering 61% have little or no confidence in the federal government. Across the country, trust in government fell 30 points from 2001 to 2020 according to the Pew Research Center. My research connects this declining trust to the quality of basic services like tap water: to trust tap water is to trust the government. During this time of declining trust in government, U.S. consumption of bottled water has skyrocketed.
At the La Follette School of Public Affairs, we acknowledge the importance of trust between citizens and government. While identifying public policy challenges, we also recognize the need to understand public administration successes. For this reason, I’m excited to serve as the chair of the 2023 La Follette Forum on March 1 in Madison. This year’s theme is, “All Policy is Implementation.” We will dive into real-world examples of successful implementation strategies and effective collaboration across sectors and levels of government in every corner of Wisconsin.
More: See details of the La Follette forum and register for the event
Attendees will have the chance to hear solution-based discussions from more than 30 experts and Wisconsin-based panelists and take part in small group discussions. Three main sessions will examine successful responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, discuss how to ensure that diverse voices are represented in decision-making, and demonstrate examples of collaborating across levels of government to combat substance abuse. Breakout panels will take up housing, infrastructure development, eliminating lead contamination, emergency medical services, law enforcement, and renewable energy.
Andrew Card, former White House Chief of Staff under President George W. Bush and U.S. Secretary of Transportation under President George H.W. Bush will kick off the event as the morning keynote speaker. The forum will close with a keynote address by Melissa Harris-Perry, former MSNBC host and Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University.
Far from the cameras and headlines, away from press conferences and courtrooms, critical but often-overlooked people and processes determine whether public policy succeeds or fails. Trust between citizen and state is forged or broken in the everyday performance of public agencies. And it’s all largely invisible to most citizens.
That’s why we’re excited to bring these ideas and processes to the foreground in this year’s forum.
Because at all times, at every level of government, all policy is implementation.
Manuel P. Teodoro is an associate professor of public affairs at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Forum aims to explore ways to restore shaky public trust in government.
