Jack Citrin Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Let's talk a little about the topics that interested you and how you came to them. I know that your early work was on government and trust in government. Tell us a little about that.
I was doing my Ph.D. during the height of turmoil in the United States and other countries where the assault on authority, political authority, social institutions, was at its maximum. The first thing that I worked on was what creates bonds of trust and allegiance between citizens and government and what erodes those feelings of trust. That was really the first phase of my career, from when I got my PhD in 1970 on, for almost a decade. That's what I wrote about, using surveys mainly but other kinds of data as well. I think I was directed to that, and the later topics that I have spent most of my time studying, by my personal background. [Your background] is what makes you feel at home, what makes you feel a connection to those who govern you, which frankly, we had never had.
You mean, your family?
My family and I never felt as a citizens, never had voted, never had the legal right to vote. Here was a situation where in a stable democracy these bonds of trust and commitment were obviously under assault, so I studied it not only empirically but also analytically: what is the meaning of trust, what does it mean to say that you trust an institution, and what does an institution have to do to sustain that trust, and what are the consequences of trust being lost?
What was the answer? What did sustain the trust?
A combination of things, as always: a sense that the process is operating as it should, and then also, over the long haul, just outcomes. In some sense trust has to be earned and re-earned. We are socialized into a particular conception of our political systems, and all systems try to socialize you into feeling committed and loyal with greater or lesser degree of success. But in the end, I personally ended up saying that the loss of trust in the late sixties and seventies in American officials and institutions was, in some sense, rational. It was based upon failed performance. So, there's a balance of prior socialization and then the impact of events, or the impact of events as perceived through messages about those events, and there, of course, the media becomes a player as well.
In the next phase of your career you continued, this set of problems by focusing on the tax revolt.
I did. The late seventies, Proposition 13, the tax revolt -- by that time I was collaborating with a professor at UCLA, David Sears -- we've done a lot of work together, and our work essentially began with a theoretical question: how much is personal self-interest the motivation of one's political attitudes, as opposed to broader attitudes such as ideology, patriotism, racism. We were doing work along those lines already, and then the tax revolt occurred and [we] had an opportunity to look at that. My own take on that was the tax revolt was, in some sense, another act of mass defiance of established elites, because Proposition 13 was opposed by every elite actor in the State of California, both major political parties, the business [establishment], the educational establishment, the labor establishment, and yet it passed overwhelmingly. It should never have happened. The way in which property tax revolt developed was, in some sense, a failure on the part of state political leaders to react to an obvious problem. My take on the tax revolt [was] that it was a manifestation of the loss of trust, or the lack of trust, that I'd been studying earlier.
I did a number of studies of direct democracy as a mechanism for popular voice. It's not always that, because direct democracy is now being manipulated by the very institutional actors it was originally intended to constrain, but that was my take on the tax revolt. It really was a development of previous work.
As I relate your research to your background I sense a consequence of the experience of your family's, and let me play this out to see if you agree. Society and the economy that they were relating to became inadequate for the problems that emerged when there was a problem with the government, [specifically] the Communist Revolutions in Russia and in China. Is that fair? In other words, I'm seeing this trend in the problem that you wound up focusing on, because in fact, for you and your family (but also for everybody), this question of trust in government is really important.
I would answer it a little differently, Harry. I think we reacted to authority. My family never were in a position to influence political authority, so in some sense we were subjects, always subjects, and had to adapt to the institutions and the system as it existed. Even in China, after the war, and certainly in Japan, these were not oppressive regimes, but you were outside. For me, wanting to, in some sense, be a member of a political community, the issue was what happens when you're in that community and when the relationship of trust is meaningful. Now you had an opportunity for voice and you don't particularly want to be constantly on the barricades, but [that's] what happens when that trust is squandered.
And then to follow up, as your career and your identity was evolving, the American identity, and the American experience, American citizenship become very important for you in your life story.
I became an American, I changed my citizenship in 1976. I could have done so earlier. I was a little bit reluctant to give up my British passport simply because it was, in some sense, what I was, but I knew that this was my home. By that time I was married, my wife is an American, was born here, and I came to feel that I wanted my child to have no ambiguities as to who she was, and what she was, and where she was from. So, I became a citizen and that enabled me to start being a citizen in the sense of voting and complaining, and all the things that we do. The experience of being naturalized, which was in a federal courthouse in San Francisco -- I was about one of, I think, 500 people at the time, the majority of whom, at that time in San Francisco, were of Chinese background, as I was, too, [laughs] even though no one would have guessed ...
[laughs] Born in Shanghai.
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