Falling Support in Established Democracies?

Critical Citizens Revisited: Chapter 4 7/6/2009 4:05 PM

Chapter 4

Falling support in established democracies?

Concern about trust and confidence in governing institutions has risen and fallen over time in periodic cyclical waves, with theories in social sciences reflecting global waves of democratization and the impact of historical events. It is important to build upon and update the main conclusions derived from this body of research. Part I summarizes the literature and then establishes the longitudinal trends in the United States and Western Europe, all countries with long experience of democracy, to see if support has eroded significantly and consistently across these states, as many commentators assume. Part II then focuses upon comparing public opinion towards democratic governance in a wider range of societies and regions around the globe, using the World Values Survey data for the broadest coverage. Democratic aspirations are contrasted with public evaluations of democratic practices. Part III explores evidence about the cognitive basis of knowledge about democracy, and how this varies by the length of experience of living within a democratic state. In particular, the study analyzes whether people in many countries are merely expressing lip-service to democratic notions, representing relatively superficial and uninformed expressions of opinion, or whether attitudes are more deeply grounded in an understanding which reflects the standard principles and processes embodied in liberal democratic theory.

I: Longitudinal trends in established democracies

The longest time-series survey data for analysis is available in established democracies and interpretations of developments in America and Western Europe have been the subject of the most extensive body of research. This work originated during the late-1950s and early-1960s, with Almond and Verba’s Civic Culture. The theoretical impetus for this study reflected contemporary concern to understand the underlying causes of regime instability during the second great reverse wave of democracy.[1] The context included the historic rise of Nazi Germany and Italian fascism and the global disruption of the Second World War, as well as the collapse during the 1960s of fledgling parliamentary democracies in many newly independent African states emerging from colonial rule, and the checkered political experience of Latin America, due to a succession of military coups, populist dictators, and Communist revolution.[2] The central message emerging from The Civic Culture emphasized that political stability required congruence between culture and structure. Almond and Vera argued that the democratic public needed to be finely balanced in equilibrium between the dangers of either an excessively deferential, apathetic and disengaged citizenry, on the one hand, or an overly-agitated, disenchanted, and heated engagement, on the other. An optimal level of political trust was posited in stable democratic states, such as Britain and the U.S., where active and watchful citizens checked the powerful, without succumbing to the destabilizing forces of either excessive loyalty and deference, at one pole, or else excessive disaffection and alienation, at the other extreme.

The idea that societies differed in their political culture was hardly novel; indeed it had been the subject of philosophical speculation for centuries, in classic works from Montesquieu to de Tocqueville. But one of the more radical aspects of the civic culture study was the way that support for the theory was derived from a path-breaking cross-national opinion survey, demonstrating that citizen’s orientations could be examined empirically. The study analyzed the mass publics in Mexico, the United States, Italy, Britain, and Germany during the late-1950s. Almond and Verba concluded that the United States (and to a lesser extent, Britain) exemplified the civic culture: “Respondents in the United States, compared with those in the other four nations, are very frequently exposed to politics. They report political discussion and involvement in political affairs, a sense of obligation to take an active part in the community, and a sense of competence to influence the government. They are frequently active members of voluntary associations. Furthermore, they tend to be affectively involved in the political system: they report emotional involvement during election campaigns, and they have a high degree of pride in the political system. And their attachment to the political system includes both generalized system affect as well as satisfaction with specific government performance.” [3] By contrast, Italy (and to a lesser extent, Mexico) exemplified an alienated political culture: “The picture of Italian political culture that has emerged from our data is one of relatively unrelieved political alienation and distrust. The Italians are particularly low in national pride, in moderate and open partisanship, in the acknowledgment of the obligation to take an active part in local community affairs, in the sense of competence to join with others in situations of political stress, in their choice of social forms of leisure activity, and in their confidence in the social environment.”[4] The question arising from contemporary developments is whether many political cultures have gradually edged closer to the Italian model during the half century since the original study was conducted, or whether civic orientations remain alive and well in many parts of the world.

During the 1960s and early-1970s, many other American and European commentators also raised questions about the capacity of democratic institutions to serve as an outlet to contain public dissent. As shown in Figure 4.1, the standard indicators in the American National Election Study (ANES) suggested that U.S. trust in the federal government in Washington DC plummeted steadily every election year from the late-1950s to the late-1970s.[5] These developments appeared to be linked to an outbreak of tumultuous protest politics in the United States and Western Europe, with urban riots in major American cities symbolizing a breakdown of social control, and mass demonstrations over issues such as Viet Nam, welfare, race, and gender. These events triggered new scholarly research comparing the causes of protest activism.[6]

[Figure 4.1 about here]

Nevertheless interpretations of the meaning of the standard ANES political trust indicators have always differed among commentators, sparking a long-standing debate. As discussed earlier, the standard American National Election Study questions about political trust emphasize the ethical standards, efficiency, and integrity of elected officials. Russell Hardin points out that these items are often used uncritically, without reflecting upon whether they actually relate to the underlying notion of political trust.[7] The items were originally designed to measure cynicism, and they mostly relate to the motivations, but not the competencies, of public officials. The items ask whether the ‘government in Washington’, or ‘people running the government’ can be trusted to ‘do what is right’, whether they ‘waste taxes’, whether government is run ‘for a few big interests’, or whether public officials are ‘crooked’. For Citrin, the erosion of American political trust during the 1960s shown in these figures can be understood to indicate an expression of public dissatisfaction with the performance of particular incumbent political leaders, representing part of the regular cycle of normal electoral politics.[8] In this perspective, public evaluations of the ethics, honesty and integrity of specific office-holders, including members of congress and specific presidents, can be expected to ebb and flow over time. For Miller, however, the ANES indicators suggest that the roots of public dissatisfaction extend more deeply to indicate a crisis of legitimacy in American democracy, representing a loss of faith that U.S. political institutions were the most appropriate ones for American society.[9] The gloomier sentiments received strong endorsement in a major influential report written during the mid-1970s for the Trilateral Commission by Crosier, Huntington and Watakuki, which diagnosed a ‘crisis’ of democratic authority afflicting not just America but also many similar post-industrial societies.[10]

This wave of concern ebbed somewhat during the 1980s, reflecting the more quiescent mass politics of the conservative Thatcher-Reagan era. Indeed according to the standard National Election Study series, a sharp revival of American trust in the federal government occurred during the first Reagan administration from 1980-1984 (see Figure 4.1), despite the deep recession in the U.S. economy during the early-1980s. The gloomier prognostication about the legitimacy crisis of democracy in the United States and Western Europe started to appear overly-alarmist. This interpretation was typified by Lipset and Schneider, who conducted a detailed study of a wide range of American public opinion polls towards government, business, and labor. [11] The study noted that mass support for many types of political institutions in the United States had indeed eroded over time, but the authors concluded that most criticisms were leveled at the behavior and performance of specific power-holders, not doubts about the underlying structure and function of American institutions. The more positive interpretation was strongly reinforced by the Beliefs in Government project, a multivolume comparison examining broader trends in Western Europe from the early-1970s until the mid or late-1990s. A thorough and detailed collaborative study, the Beliefs in Government project dismissed talk of a ‘crisis of democracy’ as exaggerated. In particular, chapters in these volumes which examining institutional confidence and trust in politicians concluded that there was little evidence of a steady secular erosion of systems support in Europe during these three decades. Instead the authors arrived at relatively sanguine conclusions which emphasized the existence of persistent cross-national differences in systems support across different European member states, and a pattern of trendless fluctuations over the years.[12]

Yet the debate was far from settled. During the early to mid-1990s, American scholars continued to express concern about civic disengagement, exemplified by a catalogue of concern about eroding social capital (Putnam), low or falling voting turnout (Teixiera), declining support for political parties (Aldrich), lack of trust in government (Nye, Zelikow and King), and plummeting popular support for Congress (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse).[13] The original Critical Citizens volume, published in 1999, extended the time-series analysis by another decade and widened the cross-national coverage by comparing many third wave democracies. In this study, Russell Dalton compared a range of established democracies and post-industrial societies during the period from the 1960s until the early-1990s, concluding that citizens had become more distant from political parties, more critical of political elites and institutions, and less positive towards government.[14] Yet patterns display considerable volatility, rather than a simple linear fall; for example, the standard trends in trust in federal government in the American National Election surveys in Figure 4.1 spanning over fifty years show an overall decline. But there are clearly periods where American trust in the federal government revived, notably in the early-1980s, during the mid-to-late 1990s, as well as peaking around the dramatic events of 9/11.[15]

Comparisons of U.S. trends can also be made using the U.S General Social Survey, conducted by NORC, which has monitored confidence in institutional leaders since the early-1970s. The GSS asks: “I am going to name some institutions in this country. As far as the people running these institutions are concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in them?” The top graph in Figure 4.2 shows the trends in American confidence in the executive branch, Congress, and the Supreme Court. The trend line summarizes the overall strength and direction of the linear trend. The results for both the executive branch and the Supreme Court clearly demonstrate a pattern of trendless fluctuation around the mean; there is no significant overall fall in institutional confidence for these institutions. The executive branch, in particular, displays considerable volatility over time, for example the sharp peaks registered temporarily in 1977, 1990-91, and again in 2001. The comparison with confidence in the US Congress shows that some parallel surges occur in public confidence, but there is less pronounced volatility, and the overall trend line shows falling support during these decades. But is this a crisis of legitimacy for government? For comparison, the bottom graph shows similar trends in the private sector for banks and financial institutions as well as major companies. Here both banks and companies show overall trends of declining confidence from the start to the end of this era, which are similar in strength to that experienced towards Congress. It is also notable that banks and financial institutions show sharper peaks and troughs than confidence in major companies.

[Figure 4.2 about here]

Part II: Global comparisons

Cross-national evidence for longitudinal trends over several decades is lacking outside of established democracies, although contemporary evidence for mass support for democratic principles from the early-to-mid 1990s has now accumulated in a broad swath of countries, as well as among different types of cultural areas, notably from the World Values Survey and from the regional Barometers conducted in post-Communist Europe, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Arab states. A global comparison of public opinion by Klingemann, based on analyzing data in the early to mid-1990s from the World Values Survey, demonstrated substantial cross-national variations, and relatively low evaluations of the performance of representative institutions, in many third-wave democracies. Confidence in government was especially low in many post-Communist European states and in parts of Latin America.[16] More recent studies based on a broader comparison across global regions have commonly echoed Klingemann’s conclusions.[17] For example, Catterberg and Moreno compared trends in confidence towards parliaments and the civil service in three dozen nations where comparisons were available over at least two points of time from 1981 to 2001, using the World Values Survey. The study concluded that confidence in these institutions declined in most of the established and third wave democracies under comparison, with some of the sharpest falls registered in Latin America and post-Communist Europe.[18] Nevertheless the exact timing of these shifts is often country-specific and many indicators display considerable volatility over time, like a jagged fall, rather than steady secular erosion. Inglehart and Welzel

At the same time, however, building on Easton’s original insights, Critical Citizens emphasized that the concept of systems support was not all of one piece, so that considerable care is needed in disentangling the most appropriate components and measures.[19] In contrast to the survey data showing rising skepticism about democratic institutions, little systematic evidence suggested a long-term ‘crisis’ in support for democratic principles over these decades, indeed rather the reverse; at the end of the twentieth century, these values commanded almost universal acceptance as an ideal; as Klingemann concluded, “I can find no evidence of growing dissatisfaction with democracy as a form of government.”[20] Nor was this pattern confined to Western societies; according to the burgeoning range of cross-national surveys, widespread public support for democratic ideals was apparent in many parts of the world, even in many states governed by autocratic regimes.[21] Surveys, including the series of global-barometers covering major world regions, suggest that many citizens around the globe have come to adhere to democratic principles and aspirations as the best system of government.[22]