Taking the dramatic decline in government trust as its starting point, Amy Lerman’s Good Enough for Government Work: The Public Reputation Crisis in America (And What We Can Do to Fix It) moves forward to examine how the public’s low level of trust has come to have its own important political effects. Rather than focusing on government’s visibility as an objective and key independent variable driving the public’s sense that government is a helpful or positive force, she instead asks how people’s perceptions of government performance influence their political attitudes and behavior. In doing so, she makes important contributions to the literature on policy feedback, political psychology, and public policy. First, Lerman provides an ambitious and exciting examination of a major issue facing American government that seeks to speak broadly about governance and democracy, rather than to identify narrow effects of specific policy design features. Second, she provides conceptual clarity on several key dimensions of trust. Third, she carefully traces the logical chain of her argument and uses interesting and sophisticated methods to provide empirical support for each claim.

Good Enough for Government Work is an ambitious and smart book. Lerman starts with a seemingly straightforward question: How do Americans’ beliefs about government competence inform their political opinions and behavior? She uses this as a foundation for a much larger argument about the dangers posed by the effects of lowered trust for American government capacity and governance quality writ large. Specifically, Lerman argues that American government is in the throes of a public reputation crisis because it has been consistently denigrated by political elites of both parties and media attention to government failures. These consistent negative messages act as powerful stereotypes against which people’s own experiences provide limited corrective potential; motivated reasoning leads individuals faced with new but incomplete information to infer (often incorrectly) that the government provides poor-quality services. This aligns with individuals’ (negative) perceptions of government competence, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle in which government becomes less effective because it has fewer resources and the composition of people who use its services changes. The self-reinforcing nature of these effects, combined with the subconscious motivated reasoning that resists easy interventions, makes this a pernicious problem for the future of American public policy.

Good Enough for Government Work has many moving parts, which Lerman has done an admirable job fashioning into a coherent whole. Chapters 1 and 2 provide important conceptual clarification with compelling empirical support that outlines two dimensions of government trust: one’s political orientation and one’s belief in the capacity of government. In Chapter 3, Lerman provides evidence that substantial numbers of Americans believe government is wasteful and inefficient (pp. 50–53), for which they blame government itself, rather than the complexity of the issues themselves (pp. 53–55). A key insight of Lerman’s argument is that strong negative views of government competence are related to increased support for privatization of public services, above and beyond partisanship and standard demographic factors (pp. 58–60). Citing Guy Molyneux and colleagues’ 2010 study (Molyneux, Guy Ruy Teixeria, and John Waley, Better Not Smaller: What Americans Want from their Federal Government, Center for American Progress, July 2010), Lerman articulates the important distinction between people’s beliefs about what government should do and actually can do, leading to negative opinions of government that cut across partisan identity (p. 61). This tension between partisanship and distrust of government forms the foundation for much of the rest of Lerman’s argument. Chapter 4 demonstrates that people infer missing information based on their existing level of trust in government, which leads them to make assumptions about the quality of publicly provided services and whether low-quality services are provided by government. Finally, Chapter 5 addresses a pressing and new question: Can citizens accurately identify and assess government’s role? This represents an important contribution to the policy feedback literature because it demonstrates (1) the difficulties Americans face in correctly attributing the provider of services; (2) that perceptions, not objective facts, of citizens’ experiences are what shape their opinion; and (3) that these perceptions are systematically biased based on their opinions of government capacity (and, to some extent, partisanship). These empirical chapters are particularly thought provoking.

They are bolstered by Lerman’s use of surveys, survey experiments, and discontinuity designs to demonstrate the strength of her key claims. The book has three substantive sections devoted to how a bad reputation becomes a sticky political problem, the consequences of a reputation crisis, and how government can address its reputation crisis, respectively. For each section, she triangulates evidence across multiple sources to demonstrate the robustness of her findings. This methodological rigor is an excellent example of how a sophisticated research design can enable study of policy feedback effects in new and interesting ways.

The final portion of Lerman’s book, which examines ways that government can respond to crises and counteract low trust, may be less compelling to readers. She argues that corporate crisis management strategies may provide some ways for government to improve its reputation and restore public trust. Given the important differences between the types of product-induced acute crises that corporations face and political actors’ long-term and active efforts to undermine government credibility, the focus on techniques of framing or taking responsibility for problems seems inadequate to the challenge. Lerman also refers to Suzanne Mettler’s book (The Submerged State, 2011), which argues that providing unbiased information can make citizens more willing to acknowledge government benefits, but then she fails to consider whether correct information can also help people better attribute the quality of public versus private service provision. To be fair, Lerman clearly explains that she believes that it is the perception of the provider that matters, rather than whether the information is (and can be) correct. However, given that she spends a significant amount of time discussing how to address this problem—that includes government officials doing a better job of communicating what they are doing—addressing this issue would be appropriate.

Overall, this book is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the complicated relationship between American government and its citizens. It also provides a model for how to study this relationship in nuanced, careful, and rigorous ways.