The crisis of institutional trust as a symptom of a deeply divided community (the example of the United States)

Abstract

The current study, based on a qualitative analysis of sociological and statistical data, tries to evaluate the scale of the crisis of institutional trust in modern American society, as well as scientific validity and heuristic value of applying the theoretical model of a “deeply divided society” to characterize the modern situation in the United States of America. The “deeply divided society” model, with rare exceptions, had been usually applied to countries and regions experiencing an early stage of nation-building and establishing of the democratic institutions after the end of the civil war, liberation from colonial dependence, political dictatorship or apartheid. The model is rarely applied to developed democracies, such as the United States, with the exception of specific regions or historical periods of their development (Southern states at the time of racial segregation), which testifies in favor of the scientific novelty of the presented study. It also highlights the key directions of academic discussion on the topic and indicates the problems embedded in a number of theoretical and empirical models, as well as clarifies the key terms. It also tries to put these and other related issues in perspective, both domestic and international.

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