We offer twelve proposals to make tap water service in the United States more excellent, open, and equitable, following the framework outlined in Chapter 8. The first set of reforms relate to improving the excellence of tap water service in the United States. They include consolidation of America’s 50,000 water systems, improvement to drinking water regulation, improvement to tap water aesthetics, increased investment in infrastructure, and increased investment in human capital in the water industry. Our next set of proposals deal with making drinking water services more open. They include the development of water system report cards, increasing the visibility and public nature of water infrastructure, and improving outreach to citizen-consumers. Our final set of reforms deals with equity. These reforms include making water services universal in the United States, conducting distributional analyses when making and implementing environmental rules, expanding the regulatory role of public utilities commissions, and embedding equity in the administration of water services.

This chapter reverses the vicious cycle from previous chapters into a virtuous cycle of trust and government excellence. Excellent and responsive government agencies foster trusting citizen-consumers who use, advocate for, and support public services. Citizen-consumers who consume public services instead of exiting to commercial alternatives are more likely to support paying for further improvements to public services. Specifically, tap water drinkers are more likely than bottled water drinkers to support paying increased water rates to fund water infrastructure improvements. We then show how the citizen exercise of voice pushes public officials to provide higher-quality services. Although governments are not well suited to respond to citizen-consumer exit, they are designed to respond to the use of voice. Increased political participation raises the possibility of punishment for poor service delivery, incentivizing officials to keep service quality high. We find that increased electoral turnout is associated with decreases in water quality violations. Reframing the relationship between trust and public services as a virtuous cycle allows us to imagine a better way forward.

Basic services – the mundane but essential necessities of daily life – hold the promise of redeeming and strengthening American democracy. The burgeoning crisis of legitimacy besetting democratic governments across the globe has emerged in large part because many citizens no longer trust authorities to secure their basic needs. Americans’ experiences with and observations of failing basic services shape their behaviors as citizens and consumers, contributing to a cycle of distrust and government failure. Breaking and reversing this vicious cycle begins with sound public administration at every level of government. Government leaders who commit to excellence, openness, and equity in basic services can spark a new, virtuous trust-building cycle. Rigorous evaluation should accompany basic service implementation to ensure excellence and build performative trust. To establish moral trust, the agencies responsible for basic services must treat people respectfully and honestly, lavishly share information, and actively engage with the communities that they serve. Rebuilding democratic governance begins with literally rebuilding the basic infrastructure that sustains life.

This chapter advances a theory of the citizen-consumer that connects the quality of basic services to trust in government, trust in government to consumer behavior, consumer behavior to citizen political participation, and citizen political participation back to the quality of basic services. When basic services are sound, citizens trust the institutions of government; when basic services fail, citizens distrust those same institutions. People who trust government rely on public services, whereas those who distrust government opt instead for more expensive commercial alternatives. This distrust premium is pure profit to government’s commercial competitors and is paid disproportionately by the politically marginalized. Consumers who use public services have a strong interest in safeguarding quality, so they are politically active citizens, demanding high-quality public services. Consumers who abandon public services in favor of commercial firms withdraw from political life. These distrustful, disengaged citizens demand little from government and oppose public investments. Starved of resources and attention, governments’ service quality declines and a vicious cycle of distrust ensues.

The choices Americans make about the water that they drink reveal deeper lessons about civic life. Consumers’ spending choices reflect, in part, their identities as citizens, and citizens’ political decisions reflect their assessments of value as consumers. When government produces or regulates a basic service, the citizen-consumer’s choice between the public provider and a private, commercial firm reflects, in part, her trust in the institutions of government. Despite America’s widely available, highly reliable, high-quality tap water, the US commercial bottled water industry has exploded over the past two decades. This skyrocketing growth comes at a time of declining trust in American government. When tap water failures occur, citizen-consumers abandon utilities in favor of commercial water, and the most distrustful and politically marginalized people are most likely to opt for bottled water. Thus, distrust of government and consumption of bottled water are most pronounced among the poor and racial/ethnic minority communities. Commercial drinking water firms capitalize on this distrust with targeted marketing and growth strategies.

High-profile water contamination crises like the one in Flint, Michigan, shake confidence in US water systems. This chapter examines the links between tap water failure, reduced trust in utilities and government, and increased demand for commercial water. We show that negative experiences with basic service quality erode overall trust in government and increase demand for private alternatives. Analyses of data from three independent national surveys demonstrate that individuals who experience problems with their local water such as dirty, bad-tasting, or low-pressure water service also report lower trust in local, state, and federal government. The relationship between water service quality and trust in government persists after controlling for party identification, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. We also find that tap water failure correlates with increased demand for commercial water sold from water kiosks, privately owned commercial water vendors. Taken together, these findings suggest that basic service failure erodes performative trust in government and increases demand for commercial drinking water.

This chapter examines the relationship between moral trust in government and the choice of citizen-consumers to exercise voice and exit. We find that when faced with tap water failure, ethnic and racial minorities are less likely to voice their concerns to utilities due to their historical marginalization in the United States. This disparity in the likelihood of exercising voice is most prevalent among poor populations, with the effect especially pronounced among Hispanics. Further, we find that citizen-consumers who lack moral trust in government are more likely to consume bottled water, signifying exit from publicly provided services. Exit from public services has downstream political effects. Citizen-consumers who drink bottled water are less likely to engage in politics. As bottled water consumption increases, voting rates decrease. The consequences of declining trust in government and the turn away from public services strikes at the heart of democracy itself. When individuals do not trust government to provide basic services, there is little reason for them to engage in public life more broadly.

Distrust in government is contagious. Awareness of drinking water problems can lead the public to distrust their own local water supply, even when people do not personally experience basic service failure. For examlple, lead-testing requests increased dramatically in Providence, Rhode Island, following the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. This chapter examines the ways that water quality problems in one water utility affect customer behavior in other communities. Using an SLX spatial econometric modeling strategy, we show that communities’ demand for commercial water increases in response to other communities’ tap water problems when the communities are demographically and/or socioeconomically alike. Notably, these “spillover” effects are strongest for communities that are socially similar: The physical distance between communities does not affect demand for commercial drinking water in the same way. These findings indicate that problems with tap water anywhere have the potential to cause distrust of tap water everywhere.

This chapter discusses the normative and doctrinal implications of the theory. At the broadest level, the book is skeptical of political control of administrative actions when it comes to particularities. This viewpoint argues against the nondelegation doctrine, popular on the right, and also against models of the state that emphasize presidential control over administrative bodies, widely popular in recent decades. Lodging control over particularities of policy in the hands of democratic organs offers only the illusion of a democratically responsive state, more often delivering various forms of capture. The preferred approach is instead for democratic organs to formulate policy at higher levels, which the public plausibly understands and provides fewer inroads for corruption, and then to have the reasoning state resolve the particularities. The chapter identifies ways in which the reasoning capacity of the state might be improved, for instance through more robust publication requirements and greater use of cost-benefit analysis.

This chapter is diagnostic in nature and marks a turn toward a normative assessment. It argues that we continue to experience high levels of distrust in government for three reasons. First, it observes that, however dark our current circumstances, the counterfactual in which the legislature is more active in lawmaking is darker still. Second, it points out that the scope of government activity has changed markedly over the last century, with the government edging into policy areas that may be comparatively difficult to build trust in. Third, and most relevant to the book’s thesis, the present state deviates from the theory in a variety of ways. For instance, administrative agencies increasingly favor thinly proceduralized actions, often at the expense of transparency, deliberation and public reasoning. Likewise, an ideology of presidential control over the administrative state threatens the space necessary for the reasoning state to thrive. Privatization of public roles, similarly, jeopardizes the place of the reasoning state.

Well-functioning governments are at the basis of a modern, democratic society, the rule of law and a market process that generates trust, opportunities, prosperity and freedom. To maintain the economic success of advanced economies and the trust of our citizens, governments need to do well on their core tasks: setting sound rules of the game in the market economy and providing high-quality, essential public goods and services. These include security, education, infrastructure, basic social safety nets, the environment and sound public finances. Public expenditure is an important tool in this regard, but more spending is not correlated with more trust – ‘better’ spending and better performance on core tasks is. This chapter also sets out the map of the book: How public spending has evolved over time and how it has been financed in Part I; government performance and efficiency, the role of expenditure reforms and the ‘optimal’ size of government in Part II; the main fiscal risks in the social and financial sphere in Part III; and the case for strong rules and institutions to govern public spending and limit fiscal risks in the concluding Part IV.

This chapter examines the relationship between trait-based (personality) anger and trust in government. I utilize the NEO-PI-R measure of anger, derived from clinical psychology, to show that individuals whose personality predisposes them to be angry are more distrustful of the national government across multiple metrics. I also show that the relationship between trait-based anger and trust in government is moderated by an individual’s partisan affiliation.