Survey on American Attitudes — 2021
By: Ben Wilterdink
Introduction
Over the past several decades, trust in many of America’s institutions has been on a steady decline. However, this decline has not been equal among all of these institutions and the media interpretation of these changing attitudes has not always been an accurate reflection of what communities closest to them actually think.
To gauge Americans’ actual views on various institutions, the Archbridge Institute commissioned a survey asking Americans’ views on eleven different social, cultural, and economic institutions. In some cases, the survey results suggest that there is cause for optimism about reforming institutions to preserve Americans’ trust in them. In other cases, Americans’ attitude toward them reveals a deep mistrust that will require deep changes to meaningfully rebuild that trust over time.
For this survey we partnered again with NORC at the University of Chicago and its AmeriSpeak® panel. AmeriSpeak® is a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the US household population. Randomly selected US households are sampled using area probability and address-based sampling, with a known, nonzero probability of selection from the NORC National Sample Frame. The nationally representative sample consisted of 2,005 respondents. The survey was conducted June 24–28, 2021.
Key Findings:
1) Americans have generally positive views on small business and entrepreneurs but had much more neutral or negative views when it comes to big business.
2) More Americans view Free Enterprise positively than neutrally or negatively, but a plurality of respondents reported neutral feelings toward Capitalism.
3) Nearly half of Americans had a neutral view of the federal government with more than twice as many Americans reporting a negative view of it than a positive one.
4) More than eighty percent of Americans viewed socialism either neutrally or negatively, with only fifteen percent reporting a positive view.
5) The vast majority of Americans reported either positive or neutral views of colleges and universities, with only a slight majority of those with a bachelor’s degree or more reporting positive views.
6) Almost half of Americans have a positive view of the police, but significantly fewer blacks and younger Americans report having a positive view.
7) More Americans have a negative view of the media than report having either a positive or neutral view. Only twelve percent of Americans report having a positive view of the media — the lowest percentage of positive attitudes included in this survey.
8) Almost half of Americans report having a neutral view of organized religion with nearly equal numbers reporting positive and negative views.
Survey Results:
Small businesses account for more than half of all employment opportunities in America. Given the number of small businesses and how often Americans’ interact with them, it’s not surprising that a strong majority of Americans have a positive view of them. However, despite the generally positive view, fewer Americans with no high school diploma (although still a majority) report having a positive view of small business.
Given the overwhelmingly positive views of small business, with more than three in four Americans reporting a positive view, the drop in positive views of entrepreneurs is somewhat surprising. Less than half of Americans with no high school diploma, those earning under $30,000 per year, and those between the ages of 18 and 29 reported having positive views of entrepreneurs. Despite the decline in positive views of entrepreneurs compared to small businesses, a substantial majority of Americans (sixty percent) still reported having a positive view of entrepreneurs.
Although just slightly fewer than half of Americans reported positive views on free enterprise, only a small minority (five percent) reported having negative views of it. Americans with no high school diploma and those between the ages of 18 and 29 were the least likely to report having positive views of free enterprise and were much more likely than other groups to have a neutral view of free enterprise.
Interestingly, women were significantly less likely to have a positive view of free enterprise than men, with only forty percent reporting a positive view compared to nearly sixty percent of men.
Fewer Americans had positive views of capitalism than either small business, entrepreneurs, or free enterprise. Americans 60 years and older were nearly twice as likely to have positive view of capitalism than Americans between the ages of 18 and 29. Similarly, Americans earning more than $100,000 per year were more than twice as likely to have positive views of capitalism than those earning under $30,000 per year.
Finally, similar to the differences in views of free enterprise, women were significantly less likely than men to report positive views about capitalism, with only 27 percent of women reporting a positive view compared with 47 percent of men.
More than half of Americans reported having a neutral view of big business, and 35 percent reported having a negative view — more than double those that reported having a positive view. This general distribution of positive, neutral, and negative views on big business was relatively consistent between all of the groups included in this survey.
While almost half of Americans had a neutral view of the federal government, more than twice as many reported having a negative view than a positive one. Attitudes on the federal government were very similar to those of big business, with slightly more Americans reporting both positive and negative views. Interestingly, four times as many Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 reported having negative views of the federal government than reported having positive views.
In total, the same percentage of Americans — 42 percent — reported having neutral and negative views of socialism, with just fifteen percent reporting a positive view. More than half of Americans aged 60 or older reported a negative view of socialism but only 23 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 reported having a negative view.
While the percentage of Americans with positive views of socialism was consistently low across surveyed groups, Americans between the ages of 18 and 29, blacks, those earning under $30,000 per year, and those with a high school diploma or less consistently reported more neutral views on socialism than negative ones.
A majority of Americans reported either positive or neutral views of colleges and universities with Americans that had at least some college more likely to report having positive views than other groups. Americans age 60 or older were least likely to have a neutral view of colleges and universities, having both the highest percentage of positive views (47 percent) and the highest number of negative views (19 percent). Additionally, men were almost twice as likely as women to have negative views of colleges and universities, with 20 percent and 11 percent reporting negative views respectively.
Although almost half of Americans have a positive view of the police, significantly fewer blacks and younger Americans report having a positive view. However, even among these two groups, only 30 percent reported having a negative view of the police. Americans age 60 or older and those earning more than $100,000 per year were most likely to report positive views of the police (61 percent and 51 percent respectively) and other, non-black, non-Hispanic Americans were most likely to report having negative views of the police (33 percent).
Of all of the institutions asked about in this survey, the highest percentage of Americans viewed the media negatively (45 percent) and the fewest viewed it positively (12 percent). Although just 17 percent reported having a positive view of the media, Americans with a bachelor’s degree or more were the most likely group to have a positive view. Conversely, whites were the most likely group to have a negative view of the media, with 52 percent reporting negative views.
Americans between the ages of 18 and 44, women, those with some college or an associate’s degree, and those earning between $30,000 and $100,000 per year were all groups in which fewer than ten percent reported having a positive view of the media.
Nearly half of Americans report having a neutral view of organized religion with almost equal numbers reporting both positive and negative views. This breakdown of views was mostly consistent across demographic groups.
However, Americans aged 60 or older and blacks were the most likely to report a positive view of organized religion, with 34 percent and 33 percent respectively. Conversely, those with a bachelor’s degree or more and those with some college or an associate’s degree were the most likely to report having negative views of organized religion with 33 percent and 31 percent respectively.
The group with the highest percentage of neutral views toward organized religion (60 percent) was Americans between the ages of 18 and 29.
Conclusion
Although many of America’s institutions are struggling to maintain public trust, declarations of total decline don’t yet fit the data. With the exception of the media, many of America’s institutions have avoided being viewed more negatively than positively or neutrally, and in the case of the media, this is perhaps due to the technological changes that have allowed an increasingly greater deal of audience self-segregation among a growing number of options across the media landscape.
However, these results clearly show that many institutions are not viewed nearly as positively as those inside them might prefer. The path back to greater amounts of public trust will be different for each of these institutions, but undertaking reforms to repair that trust is an important goal. Despite their flaws, these institutions serve important roles in our society. Tearing down institutions is almost always easier than creating new ones, and Americans might decide that the ones we have are preferable, defects and all, to not having them at all.
Ben Wilterdink is the Director of Programs for the Archbridge Institute. You can follow him on Twitter @bgwilterdink.
