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According to Gallup, on average, not great.
Since 1979, Gallup’s tracked average confidence in nine institutions (church/organized religion, military, the U.S. Supreme Court, banks, public schools, newspapers, Congress, organized labor, and big business) every year. What they found: since 1979, both Democrats’ and Republicans’ average confidence in institutions has dropped – from 50% (DEM) and 49% (GOP) in 1979, to 26% (DEM) and 37% (GOP) today.
There’s a lot of disparity in trust between individual institutions, though. Small business, the military, and science all enjoy the highest levels of confidence: 70% of Americans said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in small business, 62% had high confidence in the military, and 61% had high confidence in science. Americans had the lowest confidence in Congress (just 4% said they had a “great deal” of confidence), TV news (5%), and big business (5%).
Zooming in even further, vast partisan differences emerge in terms of how much confidence members of each party have in each institution. One of the only institutions that enjoyed similarly high levels of confidence was small business: 79% of Republicans and 68% of Democrats said they had either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in small business. Nearly every other institution measured had very different confidence levels from Democrats and Republicans… signaling that trust in institutions is increasingly affected by which party is in power.
Take a look at the confidence levels in institutions below:
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