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4 - Hyperopia and Performative Trust

How Failure over There Shapes Behavior Right Here

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2022

Manuel P. Teodoro
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Samantha Zuhlke
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
David Switzer
Affiliation:
University of Missouri, Columbia
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Summary

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Profits of Distrust
Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government
, pp. 100 - 124
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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