Andrew Yeo, associate professor, politics, and Matthew Green, associate professor, politics, were quoted in a National Catholic Register story on a spring conference on rebuilding trust. See below.
From: National Catholic Reporter Date: July 25, 2016 Author: Tom Roberts
... The latest Gallup poll of Americans' confidence in institutions, released in June, shows that confidence in all institutions, slumping for the past decade, has continued to bottom out. Confidence in newspapers and organized religion is at record lows.
While such evidence of declining trust has been baked into the polling data for years, it was the continual thrum of headlines and stories documenting the results of those divisions that caught the attention of Andrew Yeo and Matthew Green, two professors in the department of politics at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
"It was depressing when you opened the newspapers and saw the headlines and read the stories," Yeo said in an interview with NCR.
He began having informal discussions with colleagues when the headlines were mainly about what was happening in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, disturbing events related to race and police killings of young black men. A lack of trust seemed also to define American politics, with the divisiveness in Congress and the discord between parties, and it was long a characteristic of international politics, where trust was a rare commodity among nation states.
Attention, college seniors and recent grads! NCR's Bertelsen Editorial Internship program is now accepting applications. The deadline to apply is Sept. 2. Learn more.At the same time, it quickly became clear that trust could mean very different things. How Yeo, who specializes in international relations, looks at trust or distrust among nation states would be vastly different, for instance, from how an anthropologist or psychologist would consider the concept when studying communities or individuals. Among friends, trust usually means something other than trust among political entities or governmental agencies.
"We look at trust in different ways," said Yeo, "and we may end up speaking past one another."
Green, focused on the Congress and its inability to move significantly on most issues, said he was more concerned about the lack of trust among members of that institution than he was about people's lack of trust in the institution as a whole.
Read more about Yeo and Green's expertise .