If you stand on any street‑corner in America and ask strangers whether they trust Congress or big business or news media or the church, most would dodge you like you were a foul-smelling obstacle—but among those who do stop to hear your question, at least seven out of ten would say no.
Gallup’s 46‑year trend shows average public confidence in bedrock institutions has collapsed from nearly 50 percent in 1979 to just 26 percent today. This isn’t unique to America. Across the OECD, fewer than four in ten citizens now say they have “high or moderately high” trust in their national governments.
Institutional decay fuels social fragmentation and threatens the viability of our societies. But what does it mean for an institution to flourish? And why are so many of them failing?
Institutions, as sociologist W. Richard Scott defines them, “are multifaceted, durable social structures, made up of symbolic elements, social activities, and material resources.” Or as Yuval Levin more succinctly puts it, they are the “durable forms of our common life.”
Institutions can be analyzed at different levels. At the micro-level, they consist of rules, norms, and symbols that may be formal (e.g., laws or policies) or informal (e.g., unwritten customs. A handshake is an institution in this sense).
At the meso-level, we find complex institutions such as a family, a school, or a parish, which are single organizations or communities where those rules and norms are bundled into concrete roles, practices, and rituals. And at the macro-level, these entities form institutional complexes like education, religion, or government, which are ecologies of many institutions interacting together.
I founded the Institutional Flourishing Lab at The Catholic University of America to better understand the factors that shape the flourishing of institutions such as business, science, and religion. This is an attempt to weave a thread across my various research projects. From my research, I can identify four criteria for the flourishing of meso- and macro-level institutions, two internal and two external, each of which has several components.