Government and rights

Government and rights is the subject that covers how public power is organized and limited: elections, courts, agencies, the balance between federal and state authority, and the individual rights that government may not override. In the United States, trust in the federal government has fallen from 73 percent in 1958 to 17 percent in 2025 by one long-running measure, yet Americans disagree sharply about what is wrong and which rights are most at risk. This page explains what the public prioritizes, why that is hard to measure, and the strongest arguments on each side; the who decides and evidence pages go deeper.

In plain words

Most subjects ask “what should the government do?” This one asks “how should the government work, and what may it never do?”

People care about it a lot. Many feel the system does not listen to them. But they do not agree on the cause. Some think government is too big. Some think it is too weak to solve problems. Some worry most about free speech, some about voting access, some about gun rights, some about privacy.

There is one more twist. Some rights are meant to be protected even if most people vote against them. That is the whole point of a bill of rights. So a priority list can tell leaders what worries people. It cannot vote away someone else’s rights.

Defined terms

Government and rights (as a subject). Public concern with the structure, conduct, and limits of government: how officials are chosen and held accountable, how power is divided, and which individual rights constrain all of it.

Constitutional right. A protection written into a constitution, federal or state, that ordinary legislation cannot override. Changing it requires the amendment process, not a majority vote on a bill.

Federalism. The division of power between the national government and the states. The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states, or to the people, the powers “not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states”.⁠¹

Majority rule. The principle that the larger number decides. In a constitutional democracy it governs ordinary questions but not protected ones.

Process concern versus outcome concern. A process concern is about how decisions are made (fairness, transparency, access). An outcome concern is about what decisions produce. People who rank “government” as a priority often mean the first, while most other subjects in a priority list are about the second.

Institutional trust. Confidence that an institution will act competently and in good faith. It is measured by survey questions such as “How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right?”

What the public prioritizes

Government and rights shows up in surveys less as a single demand than as a widely shared dissatisfaction. Pew Research Center reports that 17 percent of Americans said in September 2025 that they trust the federal government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time,” compared with 73 percent in 1958 and a peak of 77 percent in 1964.⁠² In a July 2023 Pew survey of 8,480 adults, only 4 percent said the political system was working extremely or very well, 65 percent said they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics, and 70 percent said people in their own congressional districts have too little influence on Congress.⁠³

The same Pew survey found broad support for structural changes that do not divide neatly by party: 79 percent favored a maximum age for federal elected officials and 74 percent favored age limits for Supreme Court justices.⁠³ Gallup’s June 2025 measurement found confidence in Congress around 10 percent, the lowest of the institutions it tracks, while 62 percent expressed confidence in the military.⁠⁴

Rights are the second half of the subject, and here the public divides by what it fears. Pew asked in 2018 and again in 2021 whether the government should take steps to restrict false information online even if it limits freedom of information. Support rose from 39 percent to 48 percent, while the share preferring to protect freedom of information fell from 58 percent to 50 percent; in 2021, 65 percent of Democrats favored government steps and 70 percent of Republicans favored protecting freedom of information.⁠⁵ The same value, free expression, was ranked very differently depending on which risk a person had in mind.

Why it is hard to measure

Government and rights is hard to measure for at least four reasons.

It is about the rules, not a program. A person who ranks “education” high usually wants schools to improve. A person who ranks “government” high might want less government, more effective government, cleaner elections, stronger courts, or weaker courts. The category is the same; the demands are opposite. A single priority score hides that.

Distrust is partly partisan and changes with power. Pew’s trust series shows partisan gaps that flip with the party in the White House: in May 2024, 35 percent of Democrats and 11 percent of Republicans trusted the federal government; in September 2025 it was 9 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Republicans.⁠² A measurement of “concern about government” in any single year partly records who won the last election.

Rights questions are framed by their wording. Asking about “free speech” and asking about “false information” can produce different answers from the same people, as the Pew items above show. See question design.

Some rights belong to small or unpopular groups. A right that matters intensely to a minority will rank low in any count of how many people prioritize it. That low rank is not evidence the right is unimportant; constitutional protections exist partly because of it.

The real tradeoffs

Government and rights involves tradeoffs that no priority list can dissolve. Each pair below has serious defenders on both sides.

Majority rule versus protected rights. The Supreme Court wrote in 1943 that “the very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials,” and that fundamental rights “may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections”.⁠⁶ Critics of broad judicial power answer that judges then decide contested moral questions that voters could have settled, and that what counts as a “fundamental” right is itself disputed.

Effectiveness versus restraint. The authors of The Federalist designed the federal system so that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition”.⁠⁷ The same separation of powers that prevents abuse also makes action slow. People frustrated by gridlock and people relieved by it are often describing the same design.

National uniformity versus state variation. Federalism lets states differ. That allows experiments and local fit; it also means a person’s rights and services can change at a state line. Some state constitutions protect rights more broadly than the federal Constitution: Montana’s declares that “the right of individual privacy is essential to the well-being of a free society” and may not be infringed “without the showing of a compelling state interest”.⁠⁸

Expression versus protection from harm. Free expression and protection from fraud, harassment, or false information can conflict. The Pew data above show the public split on where to draw the line.⁠⁵

Expert administration versus democratic accountability. Agencies staffed by specialists write detailed rules that Congress does not. In 2024 the Supreme Court held that courts “may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous,” overruling the Chevron doctrine.⁠⁹ Supporters saw a restoration of the courts’ and Congress’s roles; critics argued it would shift technical judgments from experts to generalist judges.

The strongest arguments across perspectives

Government and rights debates draw on several long traditions. Each is stated here in the form its own advocates would recognize.

The limited government view. Government power is the main threat to liberty, and every expansion of it creates new opportunities for misuse. Falling trust is a rational response to overreach, debt, and agencies acting without clear authority from elected lawmakers. The remedy is fewer federal functions, more state and local control, and strict enforcement of constitutional limits.

The effective government view. Public distrust grows when government fails to deliver on problems people can see: infrastructure, health costs, housing, disaster response. Restraint is not a virtue if it leaves problems unsolved. The remedy is capable institutions with the resources and authority to act, held accountable by results.

The procedural democracy view. The core problem is unequal influence: money, gerrymandering, low-turnout primaries, and barriers to voting distort whose voices count. Research such as Gilens and Page (2014) is often cited for this view (see the evidence page for the dispute over that research).⁠¹⁰ The remedy is fairer rules for elections and representation.

The rights-first view. The measure of a government is whether it protects individual rights, especially for people who lose elections. Courts and constitutional limits are features, not obstacles. People in this tradition disagree among themselves about which rights deserve the most protection, which is one reason the debate never closes.

The civic republican view. Institutions decay when citizens withdraw. Trust cannot be legislated; it is rebuilt through participation, local responsibility, and shared civic habits. The remedy begins below Washington, in the roughly 90,000 local governments where most public decisions are made.

None of these views is held by only one party, and most people hold pieces of several.

Evidence

Government and rights claims on this page rest on long-running survey series (Pew’s trust question since 1958, Gallup’s confidence series), primary constitutional and legal text, and Supreme Court opinions. The evidence page explains what those series can and cannot show, including the dispute over whether ordinary citizens influence policy at all.

Competing interpretations

Government and rights data invite different readings.

• Distrust as signal. Low trust reflects real failures and should prompt reform.
• Distrust as polarization. Low trust mostly reflects partisan identity; it rises and falls with who holds power, so it measures political mood more than institutional performance.⁠²
• Distrust as healthy skepticism. Some argue that a free people should never trust government “most of the time,” and that the high readings of the late 1950s and early 1960s were the anomaly.
• Rights conflicts as zero sum. Some see rights claims as competing and conclude that every gain for one group is a loss for another.
• Rights conflicts as shared ground. Others point out that strong protection for speech, assembly, and due process serves whichever side is out of power, which in American politics changes often.

Application to this framework

Government and rights is where My Vote Forward is most careful about its own limits.

• As a priority. A person can rank “government and rights” as a subject. A published collective priority that many people in a city rank it highly is a real signal of concern. It does not say what kind of change they want, so any release would need to say so. See priorities.
• As an opinion. Opinions on specific, carefully worded proposals (term limits, age limits, redistricting commissions) are more informative than the subject rank. See opinions and question design.
• As a vote. Many changes in this subject require constitutional amendments or legislation, decided by legislatures and, in some states, by voters on ballot measures. A future official ballot would carry those measures; the framework does not. See private voting.
• Rights are not on the menu. The framework treats protected rights as constraints on every result, not as items to be ranked away. See representation.

Unresolved questions

• Can a priority list distinguish “I want less government” from “I want better government” without becoming a long questionnaire?
• How should a published release report a subject whose ranking swings with partisan control?
• Should rights questions be offered for opinion at all, given that their constitutional status does not depend on opinion? Or is public understanding of rights a legitimate thing to measure?
• How much of falling trust is about national institutions, and does it carry over to local government, which people use more directly?