Applause, sweet applause.

Maybe it's just the effect of the booming economy, but trust in state government is improving.

In a new era of good feelings, no level of government scores as high as the states when it comes to the question of whom do you trust to handle problems.

That's very good news indeed for state legislators who, like their counterparts on the national level, have been subjected in recent years to a rising level of voter cynicism and distrust.

Some 81 percent of respondents to a comprehensive study in 1997 and 1998 by the Pew Center for the People & the Press said they trusted the states either a "great deal" or a "fair amount" to take care of important problems. The problem-solving ability of local government also scored high - 78 percent. The feds snared only a 60 percent rating on the same question.

The Pew study, called "Deconstructing Distrust - How Americans View Government," also reveals how the states' fortunes have fluctuated with Washington's. Only 25 years ago, but just before the Watergate scandal exploded, 70 percent of respondents said they had a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the federal government to handle problems, while only 63 percent viewed the states that way.

Similarly, those who didn't trust the states was at an all-time high in 1972 - 33 percent. That number has melted to only 18 percent today.

But a lack of confidence in Washington, D.C., has moved from 29 percent in 1972 to 40 percent today.

The Pew report comes during a time when other studies and polls are showing that people like their government. It's a phenomenon that many observers would have thought impossible only six years ago. Voter hostility forced successful tax roll-back initiatives and term limit movements in nearly half the states, and the two presidential campaigns with the most energy - Pat Buchanan's bid for the Republican nomination in 1992 and Ross Perot's third party independent bid in the same year - were also the most angry.

The University of Michigan's American National Election Studies survey, for example, reveals that for the first time since the mid-1980s the overall trust level in government is on the rise. It has been since 1994, when the survey recorded the lowest trust in government since the study's inception in 1964.

Four years ago only 21 percent of the study's respondents indicated any trust at all in government, compared with 40 percent today.

But as Andy Kohut, the director of the Pew Center, points out, today's positive numbers are minnows compared with the early- and mid-1960s when most Americans thought their government could do no wrong. Then more than 65 percent of respondents said they trusted the government to do what is right always or most of the time. The numbers in support of a wide array of government programs also were consistently high during that period.

SOMETHING'S GONE RIGHT

How to explain the suddenly changed fortunes for government both at the state and national level?

"It's the economy," contends Fred Yang, vice president for Peter Hart Research in Washington, D.C. "People are feeling very good about the economy, and a growing economy lifts all boats."

"When the economy is doing well, people get the impression that their lawmakers - both state and federal - are doing something right," agrees Hal Bruno, the political commentator for ABC News. "And that is pretty much what we're seeing today. The economy has been very good for three or four years straight. Eventually it. has to have an effect on how voters view their government."

Of course, economically buoyant times do not always guarantee voter satisfaction with incumbents. In 1964, for example, the coattails of Lyndon Johnson, who won the largest popular vote in American history that year, dragged in more than 500 state legislative seats for the Democrats. Two years later with the economy still robust and pollsters gathering 60 percent trust ratings for government, the Republicans came back to win 762 state legislative seats, giving Johnson the largest party loss ever for a sitting president.

Similarly, today's growing economy, generally believed to have started as early as the summer of 1992, did not stop voters in a particularly sour mood in 1994 from taking Congress from the Democrats and awarding the GOP nearly 500 additional seats in the country's state legislatures.

"Other things count too," contends Stuart Rothenberg, the editor of the Rothenberg Political Report in Washington, D.C. "When people see that their Congress and their state legislatures are actually getting things done, that has a very strong impact on voter response."

And, as simple as it may seem, the very absence of bad news can be a good thing in and of itself. "For years so many things have gone wrong, it sort of created what seemed to be a permanent cynicism," says Bruno. He points to the war in Vietnam and Watergate as transforming events that shook people's confidence in their government and "caused great anger that reverberated into term limits and tax referendums."

But antigovernment sentiment may have reached its peak: "Much of that anger has been spent," Bruno says. "There hasn't recently been the kind of bad news that gets people enraged at their government."

Last year, Washington commentator Mark Shields, trying to dissect President Clinton's widespread popularity, said two men were responsible for bolstering Clinton's fortunes: Newt Gingrich and Timothy McVeigh.

Shields says that angry voters, fed up with Washington, got more than they bargained for with the Gingrich Congress of 1995 that helped precipitate the shutdown of the federal government. McVeigh, on the other hand, convicted of the bombing of a government office building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, symbolized to many Americans the danger of hating your government too much.

INCUMBENTS LOOK GOOD

Suddenly, holding office is no longer an obstacle to election victory. "It is as good a year right now to be an incumbent as it was in 1996 and 1997," says William Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute, who argues that the last angry watershed in American politics was the 1994 elections.

But the relatively benign sentiments now being expressed in public opinion polls on both the state and national level, says Schneider, make this year's elections hard to read.

"On the one hand, right now the Democrats have a huge advantage in the 1998 elections, a lead of about 12 points across the country," explains Schneider. "But if you ask people if their own member of Congress should be re-elected, their numbers are at an all-time high, too. And that pattern applies to the state legislative contests as well, so it's a little confusing."

Equally difficult to determine is the endurance or depth of support for government, although pollsters think it's neither. "I don't think these new numbers mean that people all of a sudden like the idea of government a whole lot more than they did before or that they are any less cynical than they used to be," says Yang of Hart Research. "Even with these good times, there is a pretty high level of distrust out there."

"The higher poll numbers show the effects of good times," concurs Alan Rosenthal, professor of political science at the Eagleton Institute of Politics. "But if you go around and talk to people, you get a pretty cynical reaction about politics and those who are in public life. What has gone up in the polling are the job performance levels of elected officials. If you ask questions that touch on cynicism and distrust, however, the negative numbers are still high."

Indeed, a separate Pew finding on the question of whether or not the ethics and moral practices of the federal government are "excellent to good" or "fair to poor" shows that in 1997 only 31 percent regarded the feds positively. A hefty 68 percent said they were either fair or poor.

Those numbers look particularly discouraging when compared with the glory days of government support, 1964, when nearly half of respondents - 47 percent - thought Washington officials had excellent to good ethical and moral practices, while only 34 percent answered negatively.

Oddly, voter regard for state government has improved during this same era of generally increasing cynicism. Twenty years ago only 63 percent thought the states capable of handling important problems. Today that figure is nearly 20 points higher.

"Devolution is part and parcel of all of this," says Kohut. "We have beyond a doubt entered an era where the vast majority of people believe small is better and more efficient. And that is good news for the states."

Not surprisingly, the states' gain has been Washington's loss. In the same 20-year period charting an increasing level of confidence in the states, positive responses toward the federal government have shrunk from 70 percent in 1972 to 60 percent last year.

Root cause of the states' fortunes, continues Kohut, is seen in the general view that the states have somehow become more competent and responsive to voters' needs, certainly more so than in the 1960s and 1970s.

"When you compare the numbers with the 1970s, you see the biggest changes," explains Kohut. "That's because we were just coming out of a time when the battle between the federal government and the states over civil rights had convinced an awful lot of people that Washington was more capable of dealing with certain sensitive problems. State governments then were not seen as being progressive or responsible enough."

Still, perhaps with memories of the civil rights battles when most of the important advances were won on the federal level, more blacks than whites say they don't trust state government to handle their problems: 27 percent of African American respondents said they had little or no confidence in the states compared with only 16 percent of the whites who were similarly skeptical.

But at the very least there has been progress: Between 1972 and 1997, the number of blacks who believe state governments can handle important problems increased by 12 percentage points.

Bruno contends that the improved numbers for state government across the board - virtually every age and educational group today views the states more positively than they did 25 years ago - are not simply a knee-jerk response to decreasing the role Washington plays in daily life.

The states rank higher today, says Bruno, because they are more confident places, dealing with a wide array of complicated, tough issues that were once seen as the exclusive province of Washington.

"State governments in general are vastly different today from what they were 25 years ago. The caliber of the state legislatures has greatly improved," argues Bruno. "I should know. I used to cover some of these legislatures back then, and a lot of them really were backwaters, the home of the good ol' boys that everyone talks about. You don't really see that kind of thing in the state legislatures of today."

Because legislatures in the 1990s have been far more willing to tackle complicated issues like health care and welfare reform, education and the environment, and have largely done so without busting state budgets, voters have seen the change and they like it. "It's really kind of simple," Bruno adds, "The state legislatures get higher marks today because they're doing better work."

Rothenberg sees the same cause and effect: "Success breeds satisfaction. And when you look at the number of states with surpluses tackling tough issues like welfare, you see high ratings for the different legislatures and the governors. I can imagine an individual legislature still getting bad press due to a particular state issue or problem, but the general mood is all on the upswing."

NEGATIVE PRESS

But press coverage of state legislatures remains critical - and sometimes misinformed. A recent study by the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity attacking the way the Illinois General Assembly does business brought this response from The Economist: "One reason why Americans may be so indifferent to scandalous tales from Washington is that they have rather worse things going on right under their noses," the magazine said. "State legislatures are not only hotbeds of sexual misbehaviour, in which a flammable brew of powerful officials and eager young staff members is constantly on the simmer, but they often subscribe to a code of ethics that makes Capitol Hill resemble a convent."

That kind of reporting, contends Rosenthal, typifies a cynical, overwhelmingly negative press that many legislatures have had to contend with in the highly charged post-Watergate era. "For creative writing you would give something like this an A. For nonfiction it's a D-. Where are those hotbeds the writer talks about? They don't exist. You can't take meals from lobbyists today, you can't go on junkets. All of that has changed. "People in public office are living in a hostile environment in most places, much more hostile than it used to be," he contends. "There are more ethics laws that they might run afoul of, there is more of an attack-dog critical media out there and there are more organized interest groups making insistent demands. Meanwhile there is more partisan competition at the state level, and there is a more disapproving public."

"Other than that," Rosenthal adds, "it's a bed of roses."

Even in good times, the chances of something going wrong for state lawmakers is great. Charles Lewis, the executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, says his group is looking for campaign finance irregularities in the states and has investigated both Illinois and Indiana. He believes that public watchdog groups have a duty to monitor the states, particularly in the wake of devolution, and his organization has just launched a two-year program to investigate other legislatures. "With devolution and more money and responsibilities falling to the state legislatures, the need for this kind of scrutiny has only increased," he says. "We're not setting out to nail legislatures, but if we find anything wrong in the way of corruption and ethics, you can be sure we will make it public."

Rosenthal, on the other hand, believes that the very existence of groups promoting changes in the way the states' campaign finance laws are currently drawn is a sign of the heated cauldron in which most legislatures must do their work.

Yet Kohut believes that despite the many landmines facing state lawmakers, the recent upturn in public regard for government and public officials should not be viewed as something good that is bound to go bad. Instead, it is an unprecedented chance to show voters that government truly can perform and respond to important events.

"It really is an opportunity for all levels of government, and this would definitely apply to the states, to perform better, to put your best foot forward," says Kohut. "The support is there for government that works, but that's the key - it has to work today in order to get the kind of support it needs."

RELATED ARTICLE: PUBLIC OPINION AND STATE LEGISLATURES

Public opinion data can be confusing.

The high scores for state government reported in this article relate to a general question about which level of government people trust the most. The percentage of people who have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in state and local government has soared over the last 2.5 years, while trust in the federal government has declined. But when pollsters ask citizens in their states, "how well do you think our legislature is doing," the answers are less positive.

Although opinions about the performance of specific state legislatures are not as high as for trust in state government in general, they, too, are moving up. Public opinion about the performance of state legislatures has rebounded from a steep dip in public esteem during the early 1990s. While the recovery of public support is noteworthy, legislatures still face a long road to build strong public confidence.

State legislative job performance ratings are closely tied to other measures of public confidence. The Gallup Poll regularly asks people about the performance of Congress, how satisfied the public is with the way things are going and how they rate economic conditions. When confidence in the economy dipped very low in 1992 (the year of "It's the economy, stupid"), the ratings of Congress and state legislatures plummeted with it. The economic recovery of the last couple of years has improved the image of our representative institutions, drawing high levels of approval. The average rating of state legislatures is generally within two or three points (better or worse) of the rating of Congress.

In individual states, the performance of the legislature and political events of the day affect the ratings. The Ohio General Assembly enjoyed outstanding positive ratings of 56 percent and 63 percent in 1997 and 1998 when the legislature was perceived as performing well in reducing taxes and coping with a court-imposed school finance crisis. At the opposite extreme, during the California economic recession in 1992, the Legislature engaged in a protracted dispute over cutting the state budget during which state employees were paid in scrip. Positive opinion of the California Legislature that year registered only 9 percent. In West Virginia in 1988 a well-publicized scandal in the Legislature culminating in the indictment of several legislative leaders resulted in positive ratings of only 8 percent.

- Karl Kurtz, NCSL 

Garry Boulard, a free-lance writer in New Orleans, is a frequent contributor to State Legislatures. His book, Huey Long Invades New Orleans: The Siege of a City, 1934-1936, was released by Pelican Publishing this spring.