Undergraduate Honors Program - Department of Communication of Science and Technology

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    Evaluating Public Trust in the State and Federal Governments During the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic: The Intersection of Politics & Science Communication
    (2022-05-05) Daniel, Bethlehem
    The nature of trust between the government and the American public has been a topic of interest for decades, however, with the onset of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, analyzing the intricate nature of trust is even more imperative. Despite the historical decline in public trust in the United States federal government, an examination of specific entities–namely the state government, the federal government, and federal agencies—is necessary given the varied responses to the pandemic. In this review, an analysis of public-facing polling data conducted by Ipsos S.A. Group was analyzed from March 2020 to March 2022 to further understand both short-term and long-term trends of trust in different levels of governance (Axios, 2022). Moreover, by analyzing these results alongside trust in healthcare agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) throughout the pandemic, trust in different levels and types of governmental institutions was illuminated. Analyses revealed that trust in the state government was relatively higher than in the federal government for the emerging pandemic (March 2020 to December 2020), and thereafter trust in both the state and federal governments stabilized (January 2021 to March 2022). However, when overlaid alongside trust in the CDC, relative trust within the CDC from August 2020 to March 2022 was consistently much higher than both trust in the federal and state governments. Given these initial findings, an analysis of potential causes for these trends is given, as well as an updated conceptual framework (Mayer et al., 1995) for analyzing trust. Overall, this review provides a foundational framework for further research into the trust of different levels of government during the COVID-19 pandemic and has implications for how to approach trust in times of crisis moving forward, from a communication perspective.