Confidence in State and Local Government

Our chapter on federalism discusses attitudes toward different levels of government. Gallup reports:

Two-thirds of Americans have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in their local governments to handle local problems, and a solid majority feel the same way about their state government.

Confidence in state government matched confidence in local government as recently as 2008; however, the former fell sharply in 2009 as statehouses across the country began to grapple with major budgetary problems, and it has yet to fully recover.

Still, Americans remain more confident in state and local government than in the two policymaking branches of the federal government, according to findings from the Sept. 8-11 update of Gallup's annual Governance poll.