Declining government confidence and policy preferences in the US: Devolution, regime effects, or symbolic change?

No trend in U.S, public opinion has elicited more enduring concern among sc holars, political commentators, ann politicians than declining levels of pu blic confidence in the federal government. Motivated by the possibility tha t this decline signals a crisis of legitimacy or growing dissatisfaction wi th the overall direction of public policy: two generations of scholarly deb ates have yielded three competing theoretical interpretations of this pheno menon. While they provide divergent answers to important questions about th e devolution of policy-making from the federal government to subnational le vel of government, competing hypotheses implied by these interpretations ha ve not been successfully evaluated We seek to advance theory and research b y investigating whether governmental confidence affects the public's willin gness to support federal involvement within specific policy domains such as health care and education. Evaluating hypotheses implied by competing inte rpretations of declining government confidence, we find that tile relations hip between government confidence and policy preferences is small and shows no evidence of trends. We discuss implications for competing and interpret ations of government confidence and the possible role of declining confiden ce in explaining contemporary patterns of welfare state retrenchment.