It is a notable irony that as democracy replaces other forms of
governing throughout the world, citizens of the most established
and prosperous democracies (the United States and Canada, Western
European nations, and Japan) increasingly report dissatisfaction
and frustration with their governments. Here, some of the most
influential political scientists at work today examine why this is
so in a volume unique in both its publication of original data and
its conclusion that low public confidence in democratic leaders and
institutions is a function of actual performance, changing
expectations, and the role of information.
The culmination of research projects directed by Robert Putnam
through the Trilateral Commission and the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, these papers present new data that allow more direct
comparisons across national borders and more detailed pictures of
trends within countries than previously possible. They show that
citizen disaffection in the Trilateral democracies is not the
result of frayed social fabric, economic insecurity, the end of the
Cold War, or public cynicism. Rather, the contributors conclude,
the trouble lies with governments and politics themselves. The
sources of the problem include governments' diminished capacity to
act in an interdependent world and a decline in institutional
performance, in combination with new public expectations and uses
of information that have altered the criteria by which people judge
their governments.
Although the authors diverge in approach, ideological affinity,
and interpretation, they adhere to a unified framework and confine
themselves to the last quarter of the twentieth century. This
focus--together with the wealth of original research results and
the uniform strength of the individual chapters--sets the volume
above other efforts to address the important and increasingly
international question of public dissatisfaction with democratic
governance. This book will have obvious appeal for a broad audience
of political scientists, politicians, policy wonks, and that still
sizable group of politically minded citizens on both sides of the
Atlantic and Pacific.
General
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