Why Is Democracy More Popular Than Democracies?
By SUSAN J. PHARR and ROBERT D. PUTNAM
Twenty-five years ago, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki sparked a heated debate by claiming that the world's richest and best-established democracies (the United States, Canada, the nations of Western Europe, and Japan) confronted a "crisis of democracy." In a far-ranging report by that name, they held that governments in those so-called Trilateral nations were trapped between rising demands from citizens and declining resources to meet those demands. While acknowledging regional and national nuances, the authors voiced alarm at what they saw ahead. The outlook for democracy, they concluded, was grim.
Looking back, the gloomy prognosis of Crozier and his colleagues seems ill-founded, if understandable. The tragic failures of democracy in the interwar period made it natural a quarter-century ago for observers of Western politics to ask whether the same thing could happen again. Today, the answer is almost certainly no. But to say that democracy per se is not at risk is far from saying that all is well with the world's richest countries.
Several years ago, we assembled a group of distinguished social scientists for another round of temperature-taking to see how the Trilateral democracies have fared over the decades since the original report. Carried out under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with financing from the Ford Foundation, the project capitalized on three decades of survey data that allow more-direct comparisons across national borders and more-detailed pictures of trends within countries than previously possible. As our new book (Disaffected Democracies: What's Troubling the Trilateral Countries?, Princeton University Press, 2000) makes clear, the news is troubling. Paradoxically, just when democracy has emerged from the cold-war era with no serious challengers, public confidence in the performance of representative institutions in these nations is at or near an all-time low.
For the 20 or so nations of the Trilateral world, the trends are disturbing on a number of fronts.
People's faith in politicians has soured appreciably. When surveys ask, "Do you think politicians are trustworthy?," or "Do members of Congress (or Parliament) care about people like you?," or "How much do you trust governments of any party to place the needs of the nation above their own political party?," citizens' responses reveal that confidence in politicians has dropped in 12 out of the 13 countries for which systematic data on this point are available. Only in the Netherlands has confidence risen.
Similarly, people's ties to political parties have weakened significantly. Although parties have long been the target of vociferous criticism, they provide the major link between citizens and governments; without them, the eminent political scientist E.E. Schattschneider once asserted, representative democracy would be unthinkable. Thus it is disturbing that in 17 of the 19 countries for which data on the matter are available, the percentage of the public who identify with a particular party has fallen significantly, leaving electorates more volatile and skeptical.
Sagging public confidence extends well beyond politicians and parties to the basic institutions of government. In 11 out of 14 countries gauged on this question, confidence in the legislature has declined, with especially severe drops in Britain, Canada, Germany, Sweden, and the United States. In 1981 and 1990, a worldwide poll measured people's confidence in five basic institutions: the legislature, the armed services, the judiciary, the police, and the civil service. Some institutions scored gains, but on average, confidence decreased by 6 percent over that single decade. Only in Denmark and Iceland were there modest gains.
Looking at the problem region by region is sobering.
* North America. The downtrend is longest and clearest in the United States, where polling has produced the most abundant and systematic evidence. Whereas two-thirds of the American public in the late 1950's and early 1960's trusted the government to do what is right, only 39 percent felt that way in 1998. In 1964, only 29 percent of the American electorate agreed that "the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves." By 1984, that figure had risen to 55 percent, and by 1998, fully 63 percent of voters concurred. In the 1960's, two-thirds of Americans rejected the statement, "Most elected officials don't care what people like me think"; in 1998, nearly two-thirds of Americans agreed with it.
Canadians, too, have been losing confidence in government. The proportion of Canadians who said "The government doesn't care what people like me think" rose from 45 percent in 1968 to 67 percent in 1993.
* Europe. While the pattern is more variegated than in North America, the basic picture is one of spreading disillusionment with established political leaders and institutions in countries as diverse as Britain, Italy, France, and Sweden. While 48 percent of the British public expressed quite a lot of confidence in the House of Commons in 1985, that figure had been halved by 1995.
Sweden, which invented the consummate welfare state and was once heralded for having found a happy "middle way" between the free-for-all of market capitalism and the oppression of state socialism, is emblematic of Europe's troubled mood. The proportion of Swedes who rejected the statement that "parties are only interested in people's votes, not in their opinions" decreased from 51 percent in 1968 to 28 percent in 1994. In 1986, even with political distrust on the rise, a majority (51 percent) of Swedes still expressed confidence in the Riksdag; by 1996, however, only 19 percent did.
In Germany and Italy, the pattern is more complex, but a downward trend is equally evident. Both nations entered the postwar era with lower confidence levels than those of many of their neighbors, and political support grew during the postwar decades. But the trends reversed at some point, and support has now eroded significantly from postwar highs. The percentage of Germans who said they trusted their Bundestag deputy to represent their interests rose from 25 percent in 1951 to 55 percent in 1978; by 1992, it had declined to 34 percent. The percentage of Italians who believe that politicians "don't care what people like me think" increased from 68 percent in 1968 to 84 percent in 1997. Traditionally, there has been less evidence of public disillusionment in some of the smaller European democracies, but patterns of growing political cynicism have become more common in Austria, Norway, Finland, and other small states during the past decade.
* Japan. The Crisis of Democracy portrayed Japan as an outlier, buffered from travails faced elsewhere by a deferential political culture, in which state authority was accepted. But available survey data for the past few decades suggest that the mood there is no better than elsewhere. The proportion of Japanese citizens who think that they exert "some influence" on national politics through elections or through demonstrations dropped steadily between 1973 and 1993. Satisfaction with politics, generally low, fell still more in the politically turbulent and economically distressed 1990's.
The news, however, is not entirely dismal. Decades of surveys in North America, Western Europe, and Japan yield little evidence of diminished support for liberal democracy. If anything, the opposite is true: Commitment to democratic values is higher than ever -- a finding that holds even in countries where disappointment with particular governments has led to the breakup of the party system itself (as in Japan and Italy from 1993 to 1995).
Nevertheless, apart from temporary disenchantment with the present government or dissatisfaction with particular leaders, most citizens in the Trilateral world have become more distrustful of politicians, more skeptical of political parties, and significantly less confident in their legislature and other political institutions. Compared with 25 years ago, the political mood in most of these countries today is not just grumpy, but profoundly critical.
Should we be worried about the many signs of erosion in the popular confidence in government and the institutions of representative democracy?
Some say no, arguing that a skeptical citizenry is a healthy thing. They add that the real challenge isn't explaining the decline of the past few decades, but, rather, why public confidence was as high as it was in the 1950's and early 1960's, especially in the United States. There are also people who see little point in asking members of the public what they think about the institutions of government, claiming that we should judge governmental performance by results, not by whether leaders and institutions are popular with citizens. Thus, if the crime rate is down, why worry if the public distrusts the police?
We strongly disagree, and see good cause for concern that voters' "report cards" on their representative institutions in the Trilateral democracies have generally become more critical, often much more critical, in recent decades. Although we do not believe that this sour mood is a precursor of the collapse of liberal democracy, we are compelled to consider why our fellow citizens are increasingly distrustful of, and discontented with, their political institutions. If the decline in public confidence is justified, then we might applaud citizens' ire, although not its cause.
There are several major explanations for what may have gone wrong. Public satisfaction with representative institutions is a function of the information to which citizens are exposed, the criteria by which they evaluate government and politics, and the actual performance of those institutions. Thus, it is possible that in increasingly media-saturated societies, people simply are getting more information than before about failures of leaders and government. Alternatively, it could be that better-educated, more-cosmopolitan citizens expect more from their leaders and institutions. Or, the problem could lie with how governments are doing their job.
At a minimum, Disaffected Democracies casts doubt on explanations studded with proper nouns (Vietnam, Nixon, Thatcher, Craxi in Italy, Mulroney in Canada, the Recruit scandal in Japan, and so on) and on several other much-heard arguments. Many people believe, for example, that the state of the economy is the best guide to how people feel about their government. However, in the United States, the largest decline in confidence occurred over the high-growth decade between 1964 and 1974; moreover, confidence actually increased during the recession of the early 1980's.
Or, some people (especially Europeans accustomed to strong social safety nets) assume that secure welfare guarantees should translate into greater confidence in government. But the fact is that -- for all the anti-"big government" rhetoric heard in many Trilateral nations since the 1980's -- governmental transfers (public spending that redistributes money from taxpayers to target groups, mainly in the form of social programs) as a percentage of gross national product have increased strikingly in all three Trilateral regions precisely over those decades in which confidence has decreased.
Although the authors of our study do not fully agree among themselves on the source of citizen disaffection, most concur that the most compelling explanation lies with the performance of government. Gauging governmental performance by objective measures is almost impossible and, in our view, beside the point. If citizen confidence declines, that is reason enough to worry. We consider citizens' declining confidence in government to be focused specifically on political institutions, and to have principally political roots.
The problems are of two types. First, there is good reason to believe that, for reasons beyond their control, the actual capacity of leaders to act on citizens' interests and desires has declined. Internationalization in particular lifts a wide range of issues out of the control of leaders in nation-states, making it harder for them to deliver for their electorates -- a problem that is especially acute in Europe, given regional integration.
Second are problems with the fidelity of leaders to citizens' wishes. Within this category fall arguments that blame political leaders for ineptitude or misconduct, or voters for failing to make their preferences known, as occurs when turnout is low. Repeated corruption scandals of the kind that have occurred in Italy and Japan over the past dozen years, for example, have almost certainly eroded confidence levels. Lack of fidelity may also result from a deterioration of the civic infrastructure. Citizenries made up of people who are civically engaged are more likely to ask for and get good government -- and the reverse is also true. Thus, breakdowns in civic engagement can translate into poor governmental performance. All citizens are adversely affected, inciting them to give their government low marks.
What should be done in the face of evidence of citizen distress in the richest and best-established democracies?
One response, of course, is complacency. Since democracy itself is not in crisis, why be concerned? Indeed, some commentators may tell their fellow citizens that the problem is a function of unrealistic expectations rather than deteriorating performance.
We disagree. Our project offered much evidence that our political systems are not, in fact, performing well, and in our view, there is good reason to seek remedies. Furthermore, with the end of the cold war and the fear it bred of nondemocratic alternatives, we are freer to experiment with our political institutions and with new means of civic renewal than at any time in the past half-century.
Too often over the past 30 years, as our fellow citizens became more and more critical of the performance of our public institutions, social scientists dismissed that trend as unworthy of serious attention. But due regard for our fellow citizens' views, as well as a prudent concern for the future, should spur scholars and policy makers alike to explore the causes of, and cures for, democratic discontent.
Susan J. Pharr and Robert D. Putnam are professors of political science at Harvard University.
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