Black Trust in US Legislatures

• Published date: 01 May 2023
• Author: Ernest Dupree,John R. Hibbing
• Date: 01 May 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12402

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 48, 2, May 2023

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12402

ERNEST DUPREE III

Lone Star College- Montgomery

JOHN R. HIBBING

University of Nebraska- Lincoln

Black Trust in US Legislatures

Trust is a key part of any political system. Given the very different experi-

ences of Black people and White people in the United States, it is likely that the

nature and contours of political trust varies widely from one racial group to the

other. In this article, we take advantage of a specially commissioned 2018 survey

to compare Black and White trust in American legislative institutions (Congress

and the state legislatures). Thanks to an oversample, we also are able to zero in on

variations across Black respondents, making it possible to identify the variables

that push legislative trust up or down within that demographic. Our findings in-

dicate that, relative to Whites, Black individuals are significantly more trusting

of Congress and that Black people who go to church tend to be more trusting of

legislative institutions while those who have experienced racism in their lives are

less trusting.

Throughout large portions of American history, Black peo-

ple were not only prohibited from voting, they were enslaved and

treated as the property of White people. Even after ostensibly

being given the right to vote in 1870, opportunities to cast votes

were routinely abused and denied, a situation that passage of the

1965 Voting Rights Act improved but did not eliminate. In short,

Black people constitute not just a numerical minority but a group

whose role in the political arena has been systematically minimized.

This status as a historically oppressed population is bound to have

affected orientations to the political system, but the precise

nature of these effects is unclear both theoretically and empirically,

leading to questions such as: how do Black people in the United

States view the political system and the various political institu-

tions composing it, and how do those perceptions vary within the

Black community depending upon individuals’ particular traits,

experiences, and orientations.

© 2022 The Authors. Legislative Studies Quarterly published by Wiley

Periodicals LLC on behalf of Washington University in St. Louis.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and

distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the

use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

400 Ernest Dupree and John R. Hibbing

Political scientists have employed a variety of terms to cap-

ture attitudes toward politics, including faith, support, approval,

confidence, and trust (see Uslaner2002, 2008 for a discussion of

the definitions, similarities, and dissimilarities of these terms).

Although results are likely to be similar with any of these words,

we chose to use the language of trust largely because trust— a be-

lief that the person or entity in question will do the right thing

without vigilance or coercion— is so central to democratic govern-

ance. In addition, a large and helpful literature has built up around

the concept (see, for example, Miller1974 and Citrin1974), mak-

ing it a sensible term to employ.

Given their central role in American democracy, we have

special interest in people’s trust in legislative bodies— Congress

as well as state legislatures— and particularly in the differences in

legislative trust across and within racial groups. American legisla-

tures have been the source of salient improvements in the political

and societal lot of Black people (for example, Congress passed the

Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965) but

on other occasions have hindered the attainment of improvements.

For decades state legislatures routinely passed Jim Crow laws, and

it took Congress more than a century to pass something as obvi-

ously needed as antilynching legislation, doing so only in March

of 2022. In light of these decidedly mixed records, how trustwor-

thy are US legislatures in the eyes of Black Americans, and what

do Black citizens want out of their government and especially out

of their legislative bodies? Beyond assessing mean levels of Black

trust in American legislatures, our major goal is to better under-

stand the reasons for variations within the Black community in

the degree to which trust is granted. Understanding why political

trust is so much higher among some Black individuals than others

will help to produce a more nuanced assessment of the nature of

political trust.

In this article, we use data from a 2018 national survey of

adults in the United States that included a demographically rep-

resentative sample of 500 Black respondents as well as a demo-

graphically representative sample of 500 White respondents. These

relatively recent and detailed data make it possible to build on

previous research that has already moved beyond general state-

ments about “Black trust”— statements that all too often imply

that Black attitudes are monolithic— to more specific conclusions

about variations in trust depending upon the type of individuals

potentially doing the trusting as well as variations in institutions