Trust in the federal government has dropped since the Clinton scandal and impeachment took center stage in the political world, according to a poll released Tuesday.
Four in five Americans do not trust the government to do the right thing most of the time, the survey of 1,204 citizens said. The Center on Policy Attitudes, a Washington-based think tank that advocates greater public involvement in the political process, conducted the study.
The survey's results show a drop from 1997, when a Pew Research Center poll found that 38 percent of the public trusted the federal government. This year's poll findings fall back to results from 1994, when only 21 percent of Americans said they trusted the government.
"It appears that the impeachment process has been accompanied by a sharp drop in the public's feeling that the government is responsive and can be trusted to do what is right," said Steven Kull, director of the Center on Policy Attitudes.
The number of Americans who trust the federal government in the 1990s is far lower than the number who had faith in Washington in the 1960s, when polls showed that three-fourths of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing.
The Center on Policy Attitudes poll released Tuesday, which focused on the public's relationship with Congress, also found that:
- About half of respondents said the government does not pay much attention to what people think when it decides what to do.
- Nearly 60 percent of respondents agreed that public officials don't care much what people like them think.
- Respondents said that Congress makes decisions that are the same as the decisions they would make about 40 percent of the time.
- Three in four respondents did not agree that "members of the government" are better informed than the public and therefore able to make wiser policy decisions.
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