democratic deficits: Chapter 511/13/2018 10:25 PM
Chapter 5
Comparingpolitical support around the world
The previous chapter established trends in public opinion in Western Europe and the United States – all affluent post-industrial societies, long-standing liberal democracies, and stable states. Instead of a tidal wave of growing political disaffection, the evidence demonstrates fluctuating support for the nation-state, its agencies and its actors. Some enduring contrasts in public opinion persist for decades, such as those distinguishing confidence in government in Norway and Italy, Britain and France, or the Netherlands and Belgium, maintaining cultural diversity among European nations.[1]European satisfaction with the performance of democracy fluctuates over time, graduallymoving upwards during the last thirty-five years. Even in the United States – where the loudest alarm bells can be heard about a supposed rising tide of political cynicism and voter anger – in fact American support for government has both risen and fallen periodically, and public confidence varies among the major branches of the federal government. The diagnosis suggests that much of the conventional prognosis turns out to be mistaken. This diagnosis does not imply that democracy has a clean bill of health. There remains genuine cause for concern in the disparities observed between public expectations and evaluations of how democracy works in practice.The next part of the book analyzeshow farsize and distribution of the democratic deficit can be explained by cultural shifts among citizens, by processes of political communications, and by the actual performance of democratic governance.
Yet post-industrial societies in Western Europe and the United States are all stable states and wealthy economies where the culture of liberal democracy has deep-seated roots which havegrown over centuries. The democratic deficit may tie policy-makers hands.[2] Deeply-unpopular governments may fall through periodic election upsets,prime ministers may be replaced by rival political leaders, while presidents who have fallen out of favor can face demands for removal from office via impeachment. Pervasivepublic dissatisfaction with how successive governments work can catalyze support for constitutional reform movements. It may also spur demands for strengtheningpublic participation and government accountability.[3]Enduring dissatisfactionwith government is widely believed to fuel contentious politics, violent acts of rebellion, and sporadic outbreaks of street protest. Periods when confidence in government sharply plummets should raise red flags when this occurs in particular countries. For all these reasons, many observers have expressed mounting anxiety about these issues.[4]
Nevertheless even with the worst case scenario, the institutional inertia of long-standing democracies makes them highly unlikely to experience a major legitimacy crisis, far less regime change or even serious threats of state failure, due to any public disaffection. In Italy, for example, as observed in the previous chapter, the majority of the public has persistently lackedconfidence in public sector institutions and satisfaction with democracy, a pattern which can be traced back half a century to TheCivic Culturesurvey in the late-1950s.[5]In the 2008 Euro-barometer, remarkably few Italians said that they tended to trust the national government (15%), the parliament (16%), or political parties (13%). It remains to be determined, however, whether this pattern is an underlying cause, or a consequence, of the polity. Over the years, Italian politics has been characterized bynumerous tensions, exemplified by outbreaksof contentious politics andepisodic street protests by students and workers, the disintegration of the once-predominant Christian Democrats and the emergence of radical nationalist parties, the repeated occurrence ofcorruption scandals in the public sector, the implementation of major reforms to the electoralsystem, and the emergence of what some regard as the ‘Second Republic’.[6] But the state hasnot collapsed.
The same is not necessarily true elsewhere. In electoral autocracies and electoral democracies which have not yet fully consolidated the transition from absolute autocracy, a serious and enduring lack of democratic legitimacy could have serious consequences for regime stability. During the twentieth century, previous waves of democratization were followed by widespread reversals.[7]There are numerous cases of nations such as Kenya, Thailand, Honduras, Bangladesh, or Fiji where regular democratic processes have been undermined by inconclusive or disputed election results, deep-rooted partisan strife and factional violence, outbreaks of major political scandals, and coup d’états by opposition forces or the military.[8] Regimes have proved relatively short-lived in some other cases; for example many Latin American constitutions have been frequently overhauled or amended.[9]Moreover in exceptional cases the most severe legitimacy crises have catalyzed state failure; in late-twentieth century Africa, in particular, rapacious and predatory rulers, deep-rooted communal violence, civil wars and conflict, and endemic poverty fuelledinsurgency movements which have challenged the authority and power of the central government and sometimes the common boundaries of the nation-state.[10] Some fear that the sluggish progress in the growth of liberal democracies during the early-21st Century, and some major reversals in countries such as Russia, Venezuela and Thailand, has been accompanied by growing weariness or ennui among the general public with this form of governance, by a wave of nostalgia supporting strong-man populist autocracy, or by a popular backlash against democracy promotion.
To understand global public opinion this chapter seeks to expand the country coverage worldwide. Again for an accurate diagnosis the survey evidence needs to be described and interpretedby paying close attention to ‘where’,‘when’, and ‘what’ has changed. If system support is relatively low, or steadily eroding, in many countries worldwide, or in states sharing similarcharacteristics in their type of regime, levels of economic development, or regional cultures, these patterns would suggest searching for generic causes. On the other hand, specific cases which are outliers also help to isolate particular causes. The timing of any fluctuations in system support is also particularly worthy of attention, with casestudies of regime change and transitions from autocracy providing important natural ‘before’ and ‘after experiments. The comparisons across multiple indicators of system support helps to determine if any changes have occurred at more specific levels (representing the normal ups and downs in political fortunes experienced by parties and political leaders) or whether any developments have affected more diffuse levels of system support, for example if feelings of national identity have been eroded in many societies by processes of globalization. This descriptive foundation cannot determine causal patterns by itself but it doesprovide the foundation for theory building generating analytical propositions, analyzed in subsequent chapters, which are grounded in an understanding of real world conditions.
This chapter uses data derived from the fifth wave of the World Values Survey, with fieldwork conducted from 2005-7 in more than fifty countries, to map the broadest cross-national patterns under a wide range of political conditions. This allows us to replicate and update previous studies, to establishwhere system support is strongest. The seminal global comparison by Hans-Dieter Klingemann, conducted based on survey data from the 1990s, first documented the significant number of ‘dissatisfied democrats’ around the world. The study found no major decline in support for democracy in the abstract, although citizens in established and younger democracies expressed considerable dissatisfaction with the performance of their regimes.[11] Accordingly this chapter can see whether this phenomenon remains evident roughly a decade later. For comparison with the trends already observed in established democracies in Western Europe and the United States,five dimensions of systems supportare examined, ranging from specific to diffuse levels, focusing upon (i) public trust and confidence in regime institutions; (ii) evaluations of democratic performance; (iii) endorsement of regime principles, including attitudes towards democratic political systems and the rejection of autocratic alternatives; (iv) support for democratic values; and also, at the most diffuse level, (v) orientations towards the nation-state, including feelings of national identity and pride.[12]In recent decades, the study of public opinion has gone global.[13] The 5th wave of the World Values Survey includes states differing substantially in their historical traditions, religiouscultures, physical and population size, degree of globalization, and levels of economic development. The analysisin this chapter focuses uponcomparing public opinion under different types of contemporary regimes. Countries are classified based on the regime typology and classification outlined earlier in Table 3.3 includinga range of 17 older liberal democracies (such as Canada, Italy, and Japan),19 younger liberal democracies (e.g. Brazil, Bulgaria, and Mali),9 electoral democracieswith more limited political rights and civil liberties (exemplified by Burkina Faso, Colombia and Morocco), and 7 autocracies(including China, Iran, and Russia).[14]
The diagnosis suggests two principle findings. First, not surprisingly, older liberal democracies which have experienced this form of governance over many decades, or even centuries, have developed slightly stronger democratic cultures, whether measured by satisfaction with democracy, endorsement of democratic attitudes, or rejection of autocracy. Yet the evidence also demonstrates that autocracies display the strongest levels of institutional confidence and feelings of nationalism. Secondly, despite these contrasts, in general the variance across indices of system support is greatest among countries within each regime category rather than among types of regimes.Today, public endorsement of democratic attitudes and values is almost universal, even in repressive regimes. This evidence therefore suggests that the process of democratization, and the contemporary type of regime, is only part of any comprehensive explanation of contemporary patterns of system support around the world.
I: Global patterns of system support
Confidence in regime institutions
As already observed, at the more specific level, the issue of declining public confidence in the core institutions of representative democracy, including parliaments, political parties, and governments, has attracted widespread concern in Western Europe and the United States.[15] Some of the angst is exaggerated in popular commentary; the evidence presented earlier showed trendless volatility in institutional confidence in most West European states. Admittedly, a few of these countries have indeed experienced a loss of public confidence incertainstate institutions during the last decade, notably in parliaments, but other societies have witnessed the reverse. Confidence in public sector institutions, however, is arguably far more critical for regime stability elsewhere in the world, especially in electoral democracies which have recently transitioned from repressive dictatorships or one-party states, as well as in deeply-divided societies emerging from conflict, such as in Iraq, the DRC, or Afghanistan, and in poor developing states with minimal resources to deliver basic public services such as clean water, health care and schooling, such as Mali and Burkina Faso. Many countries hold multiparty competitive elections which meet international standards but nevertheless the public sectoroften remains poorly institutionalized. Prospects for democratic consolidation would seem poor in thiscontextif the public expresses minimal faith in the core representative institutions, if ministers and civil servants are widely regarded as deeply corrupt and self-serving, and if the legitimacy and authority of the central government is widely challenged.
To compare global patterns, an institutional confidence scale was constructed from the fifth wave of the WVS. The composite scale measured attitudes towards seven types of public sector organizations, including political parties, the national government, the national parliament, the civil service, the courts, the police, and the armed forces. The factor analysis presented in chapter 3 demonstrated that responses to all these items were strongly inter-correlated, meaning that people who trusted parties or parliaments, for example, often usually also trusted governments and the civil service. When the pooled sample was broken down further by the type of regime, and the factor analysis run separately for each, the public living in the older liberaldemocracies distinguished between the institutions closely associated with representative government (including parties, parliaments, the government, and the civil service) and thoseinstitutions closely associated with maintaining security, rule of law, and social order (the armed forces, the police, and the courts). Elsewhere in the world, however, no such dimensions emerged from the factor analysis, suggesting that the scale based on aggregating confidence in all seven types of public sector institutions is the most appropriate one for comparison across all societies. The composite institutional confidence scale was constructed and then standardized to 100-points, for ease of comparisons across all indices.
[Table 5.1 about here]
Table 5.1 describes the distribution of the institutional confidence scale within each type of contemporary regime, in descending rank order by nation, without any prior controls. Overall, the comparison demonstratesthatautocracies displayed significantlyhigherinstitutional confidence than all other types of regimes, although it is also striking that considerable variance among countries existswithin each category. Amongst the older liberal democracies, for example, a 11-12 point gap separates the positive attitudes towards public sector institutions in Finland and Norway compared with the situation in France and the Netherlands. More substantialcontrasts of 20 points or more are displayed among the publics living in the younger liberal democracies, as exemplified by the confident sentiments recorded in India, Mali and Ghana compared with far greater skepticism expressed in Slovenia, Serbia,and Argentina. Similar substantial gaps separated different electoral democracies and autocracies, as well; for example overwhelming levels of confidence in public sector institutions were expressed in Viet Nam and China, compared with relatively weak support in Thailand and Russia. In general, there is no support from this evidence for the contention that liberal democracies gradually accumulate a much stronger and deeper reservoir of confidence towards public sector institutions, such as parliaments, governments, and parties. Instead levels of institutional confidence proved to be remarkably similar in many older and younger liberal democracies, for example if we compare Switzerland and South Africa, or if we look at contrasts between the U.S. and Indonesia.
Evaluations of democratic performance
How do people evaluate the democratic performance of their own government? This represents a more diffuse level of support which is arguably more important as an indicator; people can express increasingly skeptical attitudes towards parliamentary representatives, political parties and government leaders, but in competitive democratic states, regular elections provide periodic opportunities to ‘throw the rascals out’, providing a release valve for any disaffection. If the public loses faith in the quality of their democracy, however, this can have potentially far more significant consequences for regime stability. The ‘regime’ represents the overall constitutional arrangements and rules of the game governing any state, where the legislative, judicial and executive branches of central government are the main components. As discussed earlier, the EuroBarometer surveys of EU member states regularly gauges satisfaction with the performance of democracy (see chapter 4), and similar measures are carried elsewhere inthe International Social Survey Program and the Global-Barometers. The results have been widely analyzed in the research literature, with studies analyzing the impact of institutional design, indices of good governance, the policy performance, and the legacy of regime histories on public satisfaction with democracy.[16] Nevertheless the precise meaning of the standard survey measure of democratic satisfaction remains ambiguous and open to interpretation. The standard survey question asks: “On the whole, are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied with the way democracy works in your country?”The question may indeed capture public assessments of democratic practices and performance (including the emphasis on ‘the way democracy works in your country’). Responses to the standard question, however, have also been seen as endorsing normative approval about the general legitimacy of democratic principles (‘are you satisfied with democracy’?).[17] Using an alternative phrasing, the 5th wave WVS asks the following question: “And how democratically is this country being governed today? Again using a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 means that it is “not at all democratic” and 10 means that it is “completely democratic,” what position would you choose?” The way that this question emphasizes evaluations of how democratically each country is being governed makes it more suitable than the standard question to test public evaluations of the perceived democratic performance of regimes in each country.[18] The use of the 10-point scale also provides respondents with a more subtle range of choices than the standard question’s 4-point scale. Moreover evaluations of democratic performance using the WVSitem are strongly correlated at national-level with other WVS survey items asking respondents to evaluate respect for human rights in their own country (R=0.78 p>.000) and to express confidence in government (R=.51 p>.000). This general pattern increases confidence that the WVS democratic evaluation measure taps into how people regard the workings of their own political system more generally. The democratic performance scale was standardized to 100 points, for comparison with other indices of systems support.