REVIEW BY SUE BOLAND
Disaffected Democracies: what's troubling the trilateral countries?
Edited by Susan J. Pharr & Roberto D. Putnam
Princeton University Press 2000
362 pp, US$19.95
After declaring that "Democracy itself has triumphed as a result of the end of the Cold War", Susan J. Pharr and Robert D. Putnam, in their editorial introduction to this book, ask "why, in some of the world's oldest democracies, in an era in which democracy as a form of government has triumphed worldwide, is public confidence in leaders and the institutions of democratic governance at or near an all-time low?" Sixteen Western academics seek to answer this question in Disaffected Democracies.
Pharr and Putnam point out that mass disaffection with political institutions in the developed capitalist countries has existed for several decades. In the early 1970s, one section of the ruling capitalist elite — the Trilateral Commission — was so worried that it commissioned Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki to prepare the Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission. It was then published in 1975 as a book entitled The Crisis of Democracy.
The Trilateral Commission is a non-government organisation consisting of influential capitalists, politicians, government bureaucrats and conservative academics from what it calls the "trilateral" countries — the countries making up the European Union, as well as Japan, the USA and Canada; in other words, the three imperialist blocs. The Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973 by super-rich US financier David Rockefeller to influence government policy.
The purpose of The Crisis of Democracy was not to promote increased public participation in decision-making, but rather, to discuss how to limit the democratic aspirations of the populations of the trilateral countries in order to allow their governments to govern (for the capitalists) unfettered.
In The Crisis of Democracy, Huntington was explicit about this, writing: "The problem of governance in the United States today stems from an 'excess of democracy'... The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups. The vulnerability of democratic government in the United States comes ... from the internal dynamics of democracy itself in a highly educated, mobilised and participatory society."
In another chapter, Crozier increased public demands for political freedom and a diminished appreciation for public order and stability created governability problems for capitalist "democracies".
Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki wrote the report shortly after the surge of radical political activism that swept the developed capitalist countries in the 1960s, beginning with campus protests in the United States over civil rights and the Vietnam War, then the worker-student revolt of May 1968 in France, Italy's 1969 "Hot Autumn" strike wave and student riots in Japan.
Disaffected Democracies is intended as a 25th anniversary successor volume to The Crisis of Democracy, although it isn't as openly plutocratic as its forerunner. The book is a project of the Trilateral Commission and the "Democratic Governance" program which is funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Contributors to Disaffected Democracies had an advantage over Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki. They had access to data from the three World Values Surveys conducted between 1981-83, 1990-93, and 1995-98, and the Eurobarometer Survey series.
Evidence indicating declining public confidence in politicians and political institutions in North America, Japan and Western Europe is now abundant. The only exceptions to this trend are the smaller European countries such as the Netherlands.
Loss of trust
The downward trend is longest and clearest in the United States. When Americans were asked in the late 1950s and early 1960s, "how much of the time can you trust the government in Washington to do what is right?", three-quarters of them replied "most of the time" or "just about always". Only 39% felt this way in 1998.
In 1964 only 29% of the US 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 63%. In the 1960s, two-thirds of US people rejected the statement "most elected officials don't care what people like me think"; in 1998, nearly two-thirds of US people agreed. This negative assessment applies to virtually all parts of the government apparatus.
This decline in confidence in the US followed a decade or more of exceptionally turbulent political conflict — the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, Watergate and successor scandals.
Evidence from other countries as diverse as Canada, Britain, Italy, France and Sweden confirms this trend.
In 1987, fewer than half of Britons believed that either civil servants, the national government, or local councils could be trusted to serve the public interest. While 48% of the British public expressed a lot of confidence in the House of Commons in 1985, that figure had been halved by 1995.
Pharr says in Disaffected Democracies that "The pattern in Japan has been relatively low levels of confidence in government over all of the last 40 years, with distrust reaching near-record levels in the 1990s." A majority of respondents reported dissatisfaction with politics in 18 out of 22 Asahi Shimbun surveys conducted between 1978 and 1996; only in the mid-1980s and once again in 1991 did a majority report satisfaction.
In 1968, 51% of Swedish people rejected the statement that "parties are only interested in people's votes, not in their opinions". By 1994, only 28% of Swedes rejected the statement. In 1986, 51% of Swedes still expressed confidence in the Riksdag (parliament), but by 1996 only 19% did.
In the immediate period after World War II, support for capitalist political institutions grew in Germany and Italy. Since the 1970s, however, this support has eroded. The percentage of Germans who said they trusted their Bundestag deputy to represent their interests rose from 25% in 1951 to 55% in 1978, then declined to 34% by 1992.
The percentage of Italians who say that politicians "don't care what people like me think" increased from 68% in 1968 to 84% in 1997.
There is evidence of a decline in confidence in traditional bourgeois politicians in 12 out of 13 countries for which systematic data is available. The 12 countries are Austria, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. The exception is the Netherlands.
According to Pharr, Putnam and Russell J. Dalton, "Seldom does such a diverse group of nations reveal so consistent a trend. The only major variation is in the timing of the decline."
In the "trilateral" countries studied, citizens' skepticism toward politicians and political parties extends to the institutions of government. For example, those Americans expressing "a great deal" of confidence in the executive branch of the US government fell from 42% in 1966 to only 12% in 1997, and trust in Congress fell from 42% in 1966 to 11% in 1997.
Data from the World Values Surveys in 1981-83 and 1990-93 found that across the developed capitalist countries all the public institutions examined — armed services, judiciary, police, civil service and parliament — suffered a significant decline in confidence during the 1990s. The sharpest fall in confidence is for the armed forces, with confidence in the church also declining.
On average, confidence in these five institutions decreased by 6% over this single decade. In fact, only Denmark and Iceland displayed absolute increases in institutional confidence during the 1980s and those increases were small.
These trends aren't homogeneous across all the "trilateral" countries. The degree and timing of growing distrust of political leaders, dissatisfaction with government performance, and estrangement from established parties vary greatly depending on national traditions and specific political events.
Popular explanations
Pharr, Putnam and Dalton point out that while popular media explanations for disaffection in particular countries — the Vietnam War, Watergate and other political scandals — offer important insights into national catalysts for disaffection, it seems surprising that so many countries with different histories and traditions have simultaneously suffered from loss of confidence in their political institutions.
Pharr claims that in Japan, "officials' misconduct has been by far the single best predictor at any given point in time of citizen confidence in government over the past two decades".
Donatella della Porta, a contributor to Disaffected Democracies, found similar results in Europe. Eurobarometer survey results show that dissatisfaction with the functioning of "democracy" fluctuated between 70-90% in Italy, between 40-60% in France, and 15-40% in Germany for the years 1974 to 1995. The Transparency International Index ranks Italy as the most corrupt of the European Union countries, followed by Belgium, Greece, Spain, France, Portugal, Britain, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Finland, and Denmark.
The populations that are most satisfied with the functioning of government were those countries that had the least corruption — Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Ireland.
There is some evidence that loss of confidence in "democracy" is a result of changed social values. Dalton claims that surveys from the early 1990s indicate that the number of people who emphasise goals like enhancing the quality of life, individual freedom, lifestyle choice, free expression, and participation rather than economic security has grown to 20-30% of the public in most "trilateral" countries.
According to the World Values Survey (1990-93) this constituency displayed significantly lower levels of trust in political institutions, but significantly higher levels of trust in their fellow citizens.
Some academics such as Putnam have looked for individual psychological explanations for the loss of confidence in political institutions. They claim that people aren't as trusting in other people any more because they are less involved in voluntary groups.
Contrary to this view, trust in other people has increased gradually in all "trilateral" countries, except for the USA, over the last few decades. According to the Eurobarometer surveys, trust between citizens increased in Italy, West Germany, and France between 1976 and 1993 in opposition to the trend of trust in government.
It is also not true that people are less involved in non-government groups. In Japan, for example, interest groups almost tripled in number between 1960 and 1991. By contrast, the number of interest groups in the United States, though significantly higher than in Japan, has remained flat.
While political corruption in Italy coincided with increasing mistrust towards political institutions, voter participation is higher in Italy than in Germany and France, and political activity in Italy is at a similar level to France and Germany.
Participation in non-parliamentary protest activities such as signing petitions, supporting boycotts and attending demonstrations is on the rise in Italy, with forms of political participation such as occupying buildings achieving similar levels of support to those of France and greater than those of Germany. Union membership is very high in Italy compared with Germany and France.
According to another contributor to Disaffected Democracies, Sidney Tarrow, there is evidence that membership in new social movements and citizen action groups now exceeds formal party membership in several "trilateral" countries.
While trust in government in the USA has declined, volunteer activities have not, and surveys indicate that interest in national affairs and local politics, political discussions with friends, petition signing, support for boycotts, demonstrations, and other forms of direct action have increased.
The rate of grassroots activism seems to have increased over the past 30 years. Using data from the Political Action Study and the World Values Surveys, activism was compared in 12 European countries. According to Tarrow, "with the sole exception of Spain, the proportion of the public that reported engaging in at least two grassroots activities increased in every country between 1981 and 1990. France and Italy were at the top of the list, with 31% and 27%..."
Tarrow found that activism has also spread to new social groups. "At the end of the 1960s students and workers led most public demonstrations. By the 1990s, however, participation in unconventional political activity had increased among virtually every major sub-group of the population. The most significant increases were reported among the self-employed, citizens between 30 and 49 years of age, especially women..."
Survey data also indicates distrust of parliamentary institutions has not led to a decline in the aspiration for genuine democratic practices. More than three-quarters of the public in the "trilateral" countries agree with the statement that democracy is the best form of government.
Puzzled
Many of the contributors to Disaffected Democracies are puzzled by what they regard as contradictory trends. On the one hand, decreasing public confidence in political institutions, and on the other hand, increasing or stable levels of trust in other people, support for democratic ideas and participation in non-conventional political activity.
However, this is only a conundrum for academics and others who believe that the political system in the developed capitalist countries is really democratic.
There is no contradiction between democratic aspirations and loss of confidence in the political institutions in capitalist countries. Loss of public confidence in these institutions is a result of the mass of the population in these countries becoming aware that it is not just this or that political party in government that is corrupt or undemocratic, but that the institutions themselves are undemocratic — thy deliberately exclude the mass of the population from any real say in law-making and in determining government policies.
The interesting question is, what has led to increasing awareness of the inadequacies of capitalist-style "democracy"?
There are particular factors in each country that can be pointed to. Anthony King argues most of the dramatic decline in political confidence in the USA is concentrated in the first half of the period, between the beginning of the Vietnam War in 1964 and President Nixon's resignation a decade later. Americans believed that they had been systematically lied to and deceived.
King asserts "The fact that the decline in public trust and confidence has been so much greater in the United States than in most other countries can almost certainly be attributed to these two traumatic events... There has been no event remotely comparable to the Vietnam War in any other established democracy since the early 1960s, and only in Italy and Japan have there been events similar to America's Watergate scandal."
If you examine each of the countries where there has been a decline in confidence in political institutions, you will find that there have been particular scandals, even if not on the scale of Watergate, which have shaken public trust in the capitalist political system.
However, to understand why corruption and scandals exist in each country, and why corruption seems to be increasing, you need to examine the systemic cause of corruption — capitalism.
There are a number of features of early 21st century capitalism, which engender political crises within countries:
Many capitalists refuse to invest in production because their corporations are experiencing declining profit rates because of saturated world markets for most commodities. Instead, these capitalists find it more profitable to invest in the speculation on the stock market.
The flood of mergers and company takeovers over the last couple of years has increased monopolisation.
Profit increases in recent years have mostly resulted from driving down wages and intensifying the working process.
Corporations have made a killing when they have bought privatised public enterprises dirt cheap, often using bribes to grease the deals.
Corporations are exerting maximum pressure on national governments in all countries to drastically decrease, or eliminate, corporate tax, and to dismantle public welfare and health services.
The number of scandals and reports of corruption have increased in the 1980s and 1990s, with all of the major parties being tainted. Much of the corruption is difficult to detect. For example, della Porta pointed out that in Italy, "Corrupt politicians often produce political rents for a protected firm by paying — with public money — for nonexistent services. The most intangible services, such as expertise or brokerage, are the most difficult to control and thus the services of choice for such exchanges.
The increased policy convergence of the major political parties means that they can only differentiate themselves is by highlighting the corruption and scandals of the opposing party.
Most of the "trilateral" governments have increased attacks on democratic rights, by limiting the ability of unions to organise as well as individual civil liberties.
These common features of late 20th and early 21st century capitalism are driving the political and economic crises in each country, including the spread of corruption, so it is not surprising that the majority of the populations in all of the major "trilateral" countries have lost confidence in bourgeois politics and its institutions.
But it's also the case that non-parliamentary political activism also facilitates that loss of confidence. In the course of grassroots political struggles, people became more conscious of the lack of democracy in the "liberal democracies".
Mass struggles such as the movement against the Vietnam War deepened the democratic and egalitarian expectations of working people, just what the capitalist elite don't want to see.
While none of the contributors to Disaffected Democracies are left-wingers, the data provided in this book should give us confidence that the mass of the population in the imperialist "democracies" is steadily losing its illusions in the system, and does desire a genuinely democratic system, even if it is not yet convinced that socialism is the only democratic alternative.