For shaken institutions, a demand for accountability

It could well be that the nation is entering a period of reform, says Karlyn Bowman, a public-opinion expert at the American Enterprise Institute.

"There are always problems," comments Ms. Bowman. "But one thing democracy has an extraordinary record on is being able to fix those problems."

Of course, plenty of social and political scientists disagree.

"I'm skeptical of the degree of overhaul that might be undertaken," says Thomas Sander, executive director of the Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America, at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

The Catholic Church moves slowly, he points out, and while lawmakers may be looking at business reforms in the wake of Enron, they may not be the most effective ones, he says.

Still others reject the very premise that America is undergoing a crisis in confidence.

"The fact that two institutions, or three or four failed us" doesn't make a trend, argues Amitai Etzioni, editor of "The Responsive Community." He believes whatever crisis there is, is limited to the institutions involved.

But Hart's own data seem to indicate otherwise, at least as far as corporate America is concerned. Nearly 30 percent of Americans, for instance, believe Enron is representative of "most" or "many" companies. And within one month, trust in the accounting profession Â- not just Arthur Anderson Â- plummeted to that of faith in a used-car salesman.

When it comes down to it, says Ms. Bowman, the interpretation of "confidence" data Â- and the answers to those polls Â- simply depends on whether one is an optimist or pessimist.

Pollsters may perpetuate negativity by the kinds of questions they ask. Generally speaking, she says, questions posed in the '30s, '40s, and '50s elicited more positive public responses than those posed after 1960 Â- when public trust in private and public institutions began a broad, 40-year decline. The explanation, she suggests, can't lie in more or weightier institutional crash and burns today than in the first half of the 20th century. In the business sector, for instance, can Enron, the S&L crisis, and the junk-bond scams of the '80s really compare with the Great Depression? Rather, Bowman suggests, the culprits are the public's tendency toward nostalgia (everything was better in the old days) Â- and a pollster culture that, like the media, increasingly focuses on the negative.

One of the questions that Hart used in the NBC/WSJ poll did just that Â- it assumed failing public confidence when it asked: "There have been a number of stories in the news lately that have caused people to lose confidence in institutions that Americans used to have great faith in. Which one or two of these stories have most undermined your confidence in the institution involved?"

The Catholic Church (38 percent) and Enron (33 percent) topped the list of responses, with Olympic judges (7 percent) at the bottom.

Hart says his question was based partly on statistical evidence and partly on educated guess.

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