For more than a decade, scholars of American politics have spent considerable effort to understand the causes and consequences of our increasingly polarized and contentious political system. As Donald Trump’s presidency begins, that body of research, and especially this book by Marc Hetherington and Thomas Rudolph, is as relevant as ever. It helps to explain not only the politics that fueled Trump’s appeal but also why his efforts to “fix Washington” are unlikely to be any more effective than Barack Obama’s were when he came to office eight years earlier. In short, the clear message one takes away from reading this book is that national politics is most certainly broken, and there is little hope that much can be done about it. The authors themselves begin the concluding chapter with a chillingly honest warning: “Optimistic and idealistic to our cores, we want our students to be the answer to the political system’s ills. In writing this book, however, we have become increasingly concerned that solutions to the present situation in Washington are beyond the grasp of anyone’s best efforts” (p. 212). Of course, by the time the reader makes it to this passage, this point has already become depressingly obvious.

In Why Washington Won’t Work, Hetherington and Rudolph document the way in which trust in government has become polarized along party lines, especially since the turn of the twenty-first century, and how this polarization of trust has made it nearly impossible for elected officials to build broad coalitions in support of policy initiatives. One of the authors’ chief contributions is to trace the origin of this problem—what they term the “affective polarization” of the American public. Specifically, they show quite striking patterns of partisans holding much more negative feelings about the opposite party than in previous decades. The authors argue that since members of one party feel so negatively about the other party, they naturally are distrustful of government when it is controlled by their opponents. This argument is convincing, as is the empirical data they use to document this shift in people’s feelings about the other party. In making their argument about affective polarization, Hetherington and Rudolph may go too far in stating that there is little evidence of polarization along policy lines (e.g. on p. 15). But granting that there may also be policy polarization does not deter from the importance of the affective polarization that they document.

The book is impressive in terms of the breadth of evidence that the authors bring to bear in testing their arguments. They analyze aggregate time series data spanning several decades, panel and cross-sectional survey data from different time periods since 2000, and survey experiments conducted during the Obama administration. As the authors themselves admit, no single empirical analysis is entirely convincing on its own, but when all are taken together, one is left feeling much more confident that the empirical evidence supports the book’s claims.

This evidence builds to a particularly important insight about a “Gordian Knot” that is created by the way in which levels of trust in government tend to be influenced by economic conditions. Specifically, the authors note that trust tends to drop among all groups when the economic situation of the country is worse, yet this is precisely the time at which government intervention is most needed. Chapter 7 focuses specifically on this issue in relation to the Great Recession and Obama’s first term in office. While Obama pursued a large stimulus package in an attempt to jump-start the economy, what he ultimately was able to push through Congress was much smaller in scope. The stimulus package remained unpopular even in its reduced form. The authors demonstrate this link between trust in government and support for government spending rather convincingly, and they also show that no such connection exists between trust in government and support for tax cuts. In other words, when people trust the government less, they are less willing to support increased government spending, but their views on tax cuts are unchanged. The implications of these results are clear: “Conservatives enjoy a natural advantage over liberals in pursuing their favored policy goals during hard economic times” (p. 163).

While the book in its entirety is ambitious and important, there are some points at which lingering questions are left unaddressed. For example, in Chapter 4, the authors argue that motivated reasoning causes people 1) to evaluate conditions more favorably when their party is in power and 2) to put more weight on areas where their party is performing well when assessing how much they trust the government. The logic behind the first point has been well documented by scholars of political psychology, but it is not entirely clear why the second dynamic would happen as well. That is, if partisans are already going to assess conditions in a biased way based on what best serves their party’s interests, then why would it also be necessary to shift their evaluations to areas where their party is performing better?

Another example comes when the authors attempt to explain why trust in government would affect citizens’ policy preferences. They argue that trust operates as a heuristic, allowing people to determine whether they should support or oppose more government involvement without having to understand fully the policies being discussed or how they would be implemented (this argument is laid out very clearly on p. 121). Yet if this is how trust operates, then one would expect it to be most influential for individuals who pay less attention to politics. Those who know the least about politics and government should have to rely on the trust heuristic the most. Unfortunately, the authors never provide a test of whether this is the case, which leaves the argument about trust in government as a heuristic still a bit untested.

Finally, perhaps the most important contribution of this book is the presentation of a convincing explanation for understanding gridlock and dysfunction in Washington that focuses on public opinion, rather than on elites and institutions. Indeed, it is quite easy to read Why Washington Won’t Work and better understand the rise of Trump, a candidate whose support at least partly came from giving voice to the deep distrust that so many Republicans felt at the end of eight years of a Democratic presidency. However, while the mass behavior explanation that Hetherington and Rudolph offer is convincing, it is important that we not lose sight of the role that institutions might play in either magnifying or muting the effects they document. For example, do primaries encourage politicians to foster distrust of the other party in order to ensure that they maintain sufficient support from their base? How does the structure of Congress or our separated system of government help to magnify the issues created by the polarization of trust? Are there any institutional reforms that would allow for effective governance, even in the presence of such partisan-defined distrust?

Given that Hetherington and Rudolph are not particularly sanguine about the potential for restoring trust in government, it may be that we must ultimately consider institutional solutions for the problems they have identified.