the edit, vol. 53
the quiet cost of expecting less
There is a particular kind of political frustration that comes before an election. Voters dislike the choices in front of them, complain about the people in power and argue over who might do a better job. But something slightly different is showing up in the United States this fall: not simply disagreement with government, but declining confidence that government can solve much at all.
An AP-NORC poll released October 3 found that only about two in ten registered voters said each major political party was focused on helping people like them. Voters still distinguish between Democrats and Republicans on issues including the economy, healthcare and the cost of living, but neither party inspires broad confidence in its ability to address the country's major problems. A month before the midterm elections, that may be the more consequential finding. Americans have not stopped caring about what government does. Many have grown less certain that the people running it can deliver.
trust looks different elsewhere
The American experience is not inevitable.
The OECD's latest comparative survey, conducted in 2025, found that 40 percent of people across OECD countries reported high or moderately high trust in their national government. In Switzerland, the figure was 62 percent. Norway stood at 57 percent and Finland at 49 percent.
Those countries are hardly free of political disagreement or institutional frustration. But the OECD data suggest that trust is connected, in part, to something much more ordinary: what happens when people actually encounter public institutions.
Switzerland scored above the OECD average on all 13 measures of day-to-day interactions with public institutions. Satisfaction with administrative services reached 82 percent in 2025, while perceptions that benefit applications would be handled fairly and public data used legitimately also improved. Finland and Switzerland were also among the countries where satisfaction with administrative services exceeded 80 percent.
Education and healthcare matter too, although the relationship should not be overstated. The OECD finds that positive experiences with public services can help sustain institutional trust, while some of the strongest drivers of national-government trust are broader: whether people believe decisions are evidence-based, whether institutions respond to public input and whether citizens feel they have a meaningful say.
Switzerland illustrates that combination particularly well. Sixty-five percent of respondents there said people like them have a say in what government does, while 63 percent believed government decisions were based on the best available evidence.
Trust, in other words, does not appear to come simply from liking the government in power or from having a generous welfare state. It is reinforced when institutions repeatedly give people reason to believe they are competent, fair and responsive.
when workarounds become normal
That matters because when people stop expecting shared institutions to work, they rarely stop needing what those institutions were meant to provide. Instead, they adapt.
When a school does not provide enough support, families who can afford it hire a tutor or choose another school. When childcare is scarce, relatives fill the gap or parents pay privately. When healthcare becomes difficult to navigate, some hire advocates or pay for more direct access. When retirement feels uncertain, households are expected to build their own financial safeguards.
None of these choices is inherently a problem. Families have always helped one another, and private solutions can fill gaps that large institutions cannot. The deeper issue appears when the workaround stops being exceptional and becomes an assumed part of functioning life.
Because the ability to work around a weak institution is itself a resource.
the privilege of opting out
The family that can supplement school with private tutoring encounters the education system differently from the family that cannot. A worker with grandparents nearby experiences a childcare shortage differently from someone without them. A person who can hire an accountant, lawyer, caregiver or financial adviser navigates complicated systems differently from someone who must navigate them alone.
Two people can technically live under the same institutions while experiencing entirely different levels of security.
There is a larger risk, too. When people with the most resources can comfortably buy their way around a shared problem, they have less reason to insist that the shared system improve. A workaround becomes normal, then necessary, then almost invisible.
trust has to be earned
High trust is not automatically a democratic virtue, and skepticism is not automatically a democratic failure. Healthy democracies depend on citizens scrutinizing institutions rather than trusting them blindly.
The more important distinction may be between skepticism and resignation.
Skepticism says an institution should work better.
Resignation assumes that it probably never will.
That is why the numbers emerging ahead of America's midterm elections matter beyond the fortunes of either party. A functioning democracy does not require citizens to approve of every government or agree with every decision. It does require some underlying belief that institutions are capable of responding, correcting course, and delivering things people cannot efficiently provide for themselves.
Trust, in that sense, is less a feeling than a relationship between expectation and experience.
The task is not to trust institutions more easily. It is to resist becoming accustomed to expecting less from them.
