Publications

Negative stereotypes of government workers are widespread in media and public discourse, yet relatively little is known about the extent to which these stereotypes are held by the general American public, how they vary across groups, or how they relate to broader beliefs and interactions with government. This paper presents initial findings from Perceptions of Public Servants, an ongoing series of quarterly, nationally representative surveys and related survey experiments launched by The People Lab in December 2025 to track Americans’ stereotypes about public sector employees across four dimensions: warmth, competence, integrity, and innovation. Across four studies (N = 3,765), we find that most Americans hold broadly favorable views of public servants’ warmth, competence, and integrity — yet consistently rate them more negatively than private sector workers on the same dimensions. Stereotypes are highly polarized by party affiliation and vary by respondent characteristics and experiences, such as prior government work experience and interactions with the public sector. We also document large variations in stereotypes across specific occupations (e.g., police officers vs. librarians), as well as the labels used to describe government workers (e.g., public servants vs. bureaucrats). Importantly, stereotypes — particularly those about integrity — are also strong predictors of trust in government, as well as two consequential and timely outcomes: interest in public sector careers and beliefs about broader government efficiency. Taken together, these initial findings have implications for public sector recruitment, institutional communication, and efforts to rebuild trust in government.

Stigma features prominently in debates about the social safety net, but empirically disentangling its role has left open many questions about whether it is a meaningful—or movable—barrier to take-up. Through four nationally representative studies (N = 11,164) and a new four-dimensional validated scale, we quantify the role that stigma plays in shaping take-up (1) directly, by impacting beneficiary behavior, and (2) indirectly, by influencing program design. We find that a one standard deviation (SD) increase in stigma is associated with a 9-19 percentage point decrease in willingness to apply for benefits among low-income respondents. It also predicts a 0.08-0.40 SD increase in society’s preferences for policies and program design features that could reduce program access. In both cases, we show that stigma explains more of the variation in policy preferences than any individual respondent characteristic, including political ideology. Notably, program design causally impacts stigma in competing ways: more expansive eligibility criteria reduce stigma, while implementation designs that would simplify access increase stigma. Together, these findings suggest that stigma should be considered both an individual and structural barrier to participation in the social safety net, where it both shapes and is shaped by policy design choices.