Revitalizing Trilateral Democracies

The central thesis of the subtle, nuanced, and wide-ranging analysis by Crozier and his colleagues was this: The Trilateral democracies were increasingly overloaded by ever more insistent demands from an ever wider array of participants, raising fundamental issues of governability. Within that common framework, the three authors offered somewhat distinctive diagnoses of the problems facing their respective regions. In the case of Europe Crozier emphasized the upwelling of social mobilization, the collapse of traditional institutions and values, the resulting loss of social control, and the limited room for maneuver of governments. Huntington saw America as swamped by a ”democratic surge” that had produced more demands for equality, more participation, more political polarization, less effective political parties, and hence reduced effectiveness of government; his provocative therapy was to “restore the balance” between democracy and governability. By contrast, Watanuki described a Japan that did not (yet?) face problems of “excessive” democracy, in part because of the resources yielded by rapid economic growth and in part because of its larger reservoir of traditional values. Whatever the regional and national nuances, however, the authors generally sketched a grim outlook for Trilateral democracy: delegitimated leadership, expanded demands, overloaded government, political competition that was both intensified and fragmented, public pressures leading to nationalistic parochialism.

In historical perspective, the sense of crisis that permeated the volume (drafted during 1974 and debated at the May 1975 Plenary Session) can be seen as reflecting the confluence of two factors:

1. the surge of radical political activism that swept the West in the 1960s, beginning with campus protests in the United States about civil rights and the Vietnam War and then echoed in such far-flung and momentous episodes as the events of May 1968 in France and the “Hot Autumn” later that year in Italy; and

2. the economic upheavals triggered by the oil crisis of 1973-74 that were to engender a decade and more of higher inflation, slower growth, and worsening unemployment.

The Trilateral governments were thus trapped between rising demands from their constituents and declining resources to meet those demands. Moreover, the governments’ legitimacy was suspect in the eyes of a generation whose motto was “question authority.” Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki warned that these ominous developments posed a threat to Trilateral democracy itself.

Two decades later is an opportune time for the Commission to revisit the issue of the performance of our democratic institutions. The intervening twenty years have witnessed many important developments in our domestic societies, economies, and polities, as well as in the international setting.

Most dramatic of all, of course, was the end of the Cold War, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The end of the threat of Soviet Communism, though not signaling the end of history, surely did mark the end of an historical epoch. It transformed the fundamentals of the Trilateral security alliance. it eliminated the principal philosophical and geopolitical challenge to liberal democracy and the market economy. In some of the Trilateral countries it coincided with (and to some extent triggered) a veritable revolution in intellectual and ideological terms. In each country it transformed domestic political calculations and alignments in ways that are still to be played out.

Economically, the two decades since the Crozier-Huntington-Watanuki volume have been distinctively less happy than the twenty years preceding it. The oil shocks of 1973-74 and 1979-80 drew down the curtain on that fortunate postwar combination of high growth, low inflation, and low unemployment. Virtually all econometric analysis confirms the view of the man and woman in the street: the Western economies took a serious turn for the worse in 1973-74 from which they have yet to recover fully. The immediate inflationary effects of the oil crises were overcome through stringent monetary policies, but economic malaise continues, marked in Europe by unprecedently high structural unemployment and in the United States and Japan by sharply reduced rates of real wage growth.

Although “interdependence” was already widely discussed in the early 1970s, the integration of the world economy has continued at a rapid pace in the succeeding two decades. International trade has grown faster than gross domestic product, and foreign investment has grown more rapidly than either. The Trilateral economies are even more porous internationally than when Crozier and his colleagues wrote, and out economic fates even more interlocked. Moreover, the spread of industrialization to the Newly Industrializing Countries, itself mostly a phenomenon of the last two decades, has raised a further challenge to the competitiveness of all the Trilateral economies, including Japan.

Socially and culturally, these two decades have seen significant change in all our countries. Traditional family and community ties have been eroded, partly by increased mobility and partly by growing individuation. Some observers see evidence that the trend toward declining respect for authority that Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki underscored has continued apace in all sectors of society, and others see evidence of increased tolerance for diversity. The role of women in economic life (and to some extent in public life more generally) has expanded. The electronic media have transformed how we spend our leisure time, as well as how we follow public affairs. In most of our cities problems of drugs, crime, homelessness, and blight are more visible (and perhaps also more real) than two decades ago. The expansion of higher education during the 1950s and 1960s continues to boost the university-educated share of the electorate. Finally, older people make up a growing proportion of national populations in all our countries, a trend certain to have major consequences for both social and economic policy.

Political change in the last two decades is a pervasive theme of the present study. One element, however, deserves special emphasis at the outset. When our predecessors wrote, citizens in the Trilateral world were still primarily concerned about “market failure”—in sectors as diverse as social services, culture, and the environment—and the demand for government intervention to redress those failures was ascendant. This ideological climate fed the preoccupation of Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki about “governability.” By the early 1980s, however, public concern had shifted from market failure to “government failure,” as symbolized by the advent of Thatcher, Reagan, Nakasone, Kohl, and similar figures elsewhere. Responding to (and in part encouraging) this sea-change in public opinion, these newly powerful conservative leaders proposed to reduce the role of government. This ideological shift to the right was accelerated everywhere by the discrediting of state socialism after 1989, and it is perhaps the most dramatic of all the political changes in our countries in these twenty years. Responding in part to the altered electoral marketplace, political leaders everywhere and in virtually all parties call nowadays for less government—less bureaucracy, less regulation, less public spending—although policy reality has, as yet, changed less than political rhetoric. In one sense, the problem of “overload” identified by Crozier and his colleagues appears to have solved itself: citizens seem to have concluded that government is not the answer to all their problems. On the other hand, citizens’ expectations about government responsibility for their social and economic well-being have by no means evaporated. In fact, cutting government programs to which citizens feel ”entitled” remains difficult everywhere.

Against this backdrop of geopolitical, economic, social, and ideological change, how should we assess the current status of the Trilateral democracies? That is the question addressed in the present study.

At the outset, we want to emphasize a distinction that Crozier and his colleagues felt less need to stress—a distinction between the effectiveness of specific democratic governments and the durability of democratic institutions as such. On the one hand, we see no evidence at all in any of our countries that democracy itself is at risk, in the sense of its being supplanted by an alternative, undemocratic political regime or by social or political anarchy. On the other hand, throughout the Trilateral world we do see substantial evidence—much greater than that available to our predecessors two decades ago—of mounting public unhappiness with politics and government, discontent deriving in part from real shortfalls in political and governmental performance.

Earlier alarm bells about the stability of democracy itself, which our predecessors were in part responding to and in part amplifying, seem now exaggerated. The happy contrast between political developments in the advanced democracies after World War I and political developments in those same countries after World War II is indeed dramatic. Within the first two decades after World War I fledgling democracies had collapsed in Italy, Germany, Spain, and Japan, and more established democracies were under siege elsewhere. Now, five decades after World War II, democratic regimes are thoroughly rooted throughout the Trilateral world. Bearing in mind the tragic interwar failures of democracy, it was entirely natural that observers of Western politics in the first decades after World War II would recurrently ask “Could it happen again?” or even “Is it happening again?” Political science has a poor record of prognostication, especially with respect to radical political change, and we should not be too presumptuous in responding to such fundamental issues. With a half century of democratic stability under our collective belts, however, the answer to these apocalyptic questions is almost certainly “no.”

The case for this optimism does not rest simply on the passage of time. In decades of surveys we find no evidence of diminished support for liberal democracy among either mass publics or elites. If anything, the evidence runs to the contrary, that is, that commitment to democratic values and political liberty is higher than ever. No serious intellectual or ideological challenge to democracy has emerged, in sharp contrast to the period after World War I. Whether tracked over the five decades since the war or the five years since the fall of the Wall, opponents of democracy have lost support. Even where public discontent with the performance of particular democratic governments has become so acute as to overturn the party system itself (as in Japan and Italy in 1993-95), these changes have transpired without any serious threat to fundamental democratic principles and institutions. In this sense, we see no significant evidence of “a crisis of democracy.”

To say that democracy itself is not at risk, however, is far from saying that all is well with politics and government in the Trilateral world. In fact, virtually all our democracies are deeply troubled. This chapter summarizes some evidence for that claim, while the succeeding chapters explore alternative diagnoses of these troubles.

Symptoms of Distress:
Public Evaluations of Politics and Government
One of the major ironies of this last decade of the millennium is that just at the moment when liberal democracy has defeated all its enemies on the ideological and geopolitical battlefields, many people in the established democracies believe that our own political institutions are faltering, not flourishing.

To be sure, even in the well-established Anglo-American democracies citizens have long expressed a hearty skepticism about political leaders and government authority. As Professor Ivor Crewe recently testified to the Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life in Britain, “As regards elected politicians, the British public have always displayed a widespread and some would say —I would say—healthy cynicism. They have simply taken it for granted, in a fairly good-humoured way, I should add, until recently, that most MPs are self-serving impostors and hypocrites who put party before country and self before party. Over 50 years ago, in August 1944, Gallup asked people whether politicians were merely out for themselves, for their party or to do the best for their country. Bear in mind that this was a time when party politics was suspended for the duration and when the war was clearly being won, but even then barely over a third—36%—answered that politicians put the country first and as many answered that politicians put themselves first.”

In the United States, too, suspicion about the motives and the abilities of the powerful is a time-honored tradition. In other Trilateral countries, cynicism about government has been even more chronic and endemic, as reflected, for example, in the nineteenth century epithet from the Italian countryside, Piove, governs ladro [It’s raining, thief of a government]. Public criticism of public leaders is neither new nor in itself particularly worrisome.

What is more troubling, however, is that the last two decades—the period since Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki surveyed the state of the Trilateral democracies—have witnessed a widespread increase in cynicism about politics and government and an equally widespread decline in confidence in political leaders, in established political parties, and in government more generally. Whatever the “background level” of public censure, which no doubt varies among our countries, citizens in most of our countries are much less satisfied with the performance of their political systems than they were two decades ago. It is this change that merits our attention.

The onset and the depth of this disillusionment vary from country to country. The down-trend seems longest and strongest in the United States, where polling has left the most abundant systematic evidence. 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 said “most of the time” or “all of the time,” a response that now sounds almost unbelievably quaint. As Figure 1.1 shows, this measure of public confidence in the ability and benevolence of government has fallen almost uninterruptedly for thirty years, from 76 percent in 1964 to 19 percent in 1994. The decline was briefly interrupted by the “Morning in America” prosperity of the first Reagan Administration and even more briefly by the Gulf War victory, but confidence in government ended up lower after twelve years of Republican rule. In fact, of the total decline, roughly half has occurred under Republican administrations and roughly half under Democratic ones.

Many similar questions tell the same story. For example, 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” instead of for the benefit of all people. By 1984 agreement with this statement had risen to 55 percent, and by 1992 fully 76 percent of the voters concurred. In 1994 two thirds of Americans said that “most elected officials don’t care what people like me think,” whereas in the 1960s two thirds of Americans rejected that same judgment. This negative assessment encompasses virtually all parts of the apparatus of government. Those expressing “a great deal” of confidence in the executive branch fell from 42 percent in 1966 to only 12 percent in 1994, and equivalent trust in Congress fell from 42 percent in 1966 to 8 percent in 1994.

Virtually every year since 1966 the Harris Poll has posed a set of five questions to national samples of Americans, designed to measure their general political alienation:

* The people running the country don’t really care what happens to you.
* Most people with power try to take advantage of people like yourself.
* You’re left out of things going on around you.
* The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
* What you think doesn’t count very much anymore.

Every item on this list has won more and more assent from Americans in recent years. Whereas in the late 1960s—at the very height of the Vietnam protests—an average of barely one third of Americans endorsed these cynical views, by the early 1990s fully two thirds of all Americans concurred. By any measure, political alienation has soared over the last three decades.

Evidence from Canada, though less abundant and less dramatic, conforms to this same general picture. Despite the normal fluctuations of the political cycle, ratings of specific political parties and of individual leaders have tended to fall over the last two decades, as has confidence in the major institutions of Canadian politics and government. For example, the fraction of Canadian voters who say that “the government doesn’t care much what people like me think” swelled from 45 percent in 1968 to 67 percent in 1993, the proportion who feel “very little” or ”no” confidence in political parties more than doubled from 22 percent in 1979 to 46 percent in 1991, and among those willing to express an opinion, the proportion who felt “a great deal” or “a lot” of respect and confidence in the House of Commons fell from 49 percent in 1974 to 29 percent in 1990.6 By 1992 only 34 percent of Canadians said they were satisfied with their system of government, down from 51 percent as recently as 1986. Though Canadians express their views in a characteristically more muted tone than their American neighbors, they too are increasingly discontent with the performance of their political system.

Comparable trends in public opinion in Europe are more variegated and (at least until recently) less clear-cut, but here too the basic picture is one of increasing disillusionment with established political leaders and institutions. Trust in politicians and major political institutions has fallen over the last decade or two in countries as diverse as Britain, Spain, Sweden, Italy, and France. Sweden, once widely considered to have invented the consummate welfare state and to have found a happy “middle way” between the free-for-all of free enterprise and the oppression of state socialism, is emblematic of the newly troubled public mood. According to repeated surveys over the last quarter century, the proportion of Swedes who agree both that “parties are only interested in people’s votes, not in their opinions” and that “those who sit in parliament and make decisions don’t care about what average people think” has risen steadily from 42 percent in 1968 to nearly 70 percent in 1992. By contrast, at least until recently, such trends have been less visible in Germany and the smaller European democracies. Within the last five years, however, discontent with the performance of Europe’s democratic institutions, both national and supranational, has become widespread throughout the European Union.

The most comprehensive evidence on long-term trends, including this recent downturn, comes from the “Eurobarometer” survey. This poll, conducted by the European Commission for the last two decades, has regularly asked national electorates in each Member State, “On the whole, are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied with the way democracy works in [this country/the European Community]?” Figure 1.2 shows how a burst of democratic optimism in 1989-1990, immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was quickly succeeded by an unprecedented slump in Europeans’ evaluations of the actual performance of their own democratic institutions. A recent report from the Commission summarizes the latest results:

In autumn 1992, those dissatisfied with their country’s democracy became a majority for the first time since the question started being asked by EUROBAROMETER in 1973. Since this development, the gap between those dissatisfied and those satisfied has continued to grow. Now 55 percent of EC citizens are dissatisfied with how their country’s democracy works, while only 42 percent are satisfied. Additionally, satisfaction with EC democracy—asked in [1993] using similar question-wording as for satisfaction with national democracy for the first time shows 47 percent dissatisfied and 40 percent satisfied.

Slumping public evaluations of politics and government in Japan lie midway between the long-term declines of North America and the shorter, sharper plunge characteristic of Europe. The roots of Japanese disillusionment with established parties and leaders can be traced back more than a decade, but this trend has accelerated in the last five years. The longer term trend toward less deference to political leaders, diminished loyalty to the major political parties (especially the LDP), and increased political dissatisfaction considerably predates the scandals that brought down the LDP in 1993-1994.

Figure 1.3 shows, for example, that the proportion of Japanese voters who agree with the deferential view that “in order to make Japan better, it is best to rely on talented politicians, rather than to let the citizens argue among themselves,” has fallen steadily for 40 years, probably a good indicator of the strengthening of the cultural and sociological foundations of Japanese democracy. On the other hand, Table 1.1 shows that the proportion of Japanese voters who feel that they exert little or no influence on national politics through elections, through demonstrations, or through expressions of public opinion rose steadily between 1973 and 1993. In other words, over the last twenty years Japanese voters have become steadily less satisfied with their own limited role in Japanese politics. This is the backdrop against which the scandals of 1993-94 broke over the LDP, causing public esteem for political leadership to plummet still further.

Rising disaffection with the major political parties and declining engagement with those parties is virtually universal in all three regions of the Trilateral world, representing trends in most cases that extend over several decades. In many countries, this collapse of traditional party loyalties has been accompanied by the appearance of “surge” parties from outside the ranks of the established political class—Berlusconi in Italy, Perot in the United States, Manning in Canada, Hosokawa in Japan. Each of these cases is unique in some respects, to be sure, but all reflect the unhappiness of voters with the existing political alternatives.

None of these individual “surge” movements is likely to have much staying power, for both their success and their vulnerability derives from the fact that voting now more often represents a negative judgment on government performance (or prospective performance) and less often an affirmation of commitment to a positive program. This underlying crumbling of party affiliation helps explain why in 1993-1994 every region witnessed complete upheavals in party systems—in Japan, in Canada, and in Italy -- that had dominated national politics throughout most of the postwar period. That Perot’s almost unparalleled success as a third-party candidate in the U.S. elections of 1992 may be a precursor of further turbulence in American party politics as well is indicated by the fact that “in 1994, for the first time in polling history, a majority of those [Americans] interviewed, 53 percent, told Gallup that they would like to see a third major party.”11

Elsewhere the detachment of voters from political parties, the collapse in party membership, and the increase in electoral volatility has been less dramatic, but these trends became nearly universal in the 1980s. Party alignments that had endured for the better part of a century have been rendered more kaleidoscopic by voter unhappiness. To be sure, shifts in support from one party to another are a normal element of the adaptation of democratic political systems to social, economic, and political change. What is more striking about the last decade or two is the increasing evidence of discontent with virtually all established parties and political leaders simultaneously. In survey jargon, more of us than ever before are choosing “none of the above.” Citizens nearly everywhere throughout the Trilateral world have been voting for “change” for much of the last decade and more, but almost nowhere are they satisfied with the results.

The trends that we have described in this section are not homogeneous across all the Trilateral countries. The degree and timing of increasing distrust of political leaders, dissatisfaction with government performance, and estrangement from established parties vary greatly, depending on national traditions, specific political events, the effectiveness of individual leaders, and so on. Generally speaking, the trends are clearer in the larger countries -- and clearest of all in the largest—and sometimes hardly visible in the smallest countries. Nevertheless, most citizens in the Trilateral world are ruled by political institutions that are, in the eyes of their constituents, performing less well than those constituents had thought a decade or two ago. In other words, compared to the state of public opinion at the time that Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki wrote, the political mood in most of our countries today is not just grumpy, but much grumpier.

Even if this sour mood is not a precursor to the collapse of Western democracies—and we do not believe that it is—a decent respect for our fellow citizens’ views should compel us to consider why they are so distrustful and discontent. In each of our countries, explanations have been offered for the rise of political distrust, and each of these stories is studded with proper names. Americans refer to Vietnam and Watergate, to Carter and Clinton or (depending on their partisan predilections) Reagan and Bush. In Italy, Craxi’s Socialists and Andreotti’s Christian Democrats get the blame, in Sweden it is fault of the Social Democrats, in Japan, of the Liberal Democrats, in Canada, of Mulroney’s misguided constitutional engineering, and in England, of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Such interpretations capture important insights into the national catalysts for democratic distress, but we doubt that they are the entire story, precisely because of the cross-national similarities. It seems improbable that so many independent democracies would simply happen to encounter rough water or careless captains at the same time. So, while we do not discount the importance of specific national factors, we seek here to undercover underlying commonalties.

Public Satisfaction and Government Performance
The symptoms of distress sketched above in the attitudes and political behavior of our fellow citizens would be less troubling if we could counter them with other indicators showing that the performance of our governments has not declined, or that the distress is “just in our heads.” Public satisfaction is itself a compound of expectations and actual performance. In a loose sense, that is,

Satisfaction = Performance/Expectations

In other words, lower satisfaction might reflect lower performance, or higher expectations, or some combination of the two.

Twenty years ago, Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki attributed public discontent to excessively high expectations about what government can do. Since 1974, however, public expectations of government seem to have declined in many of our countries. As we have already noted, in most of our countries at one time or another during this period governments have been popularly elected that were pledged to reduce the role of government in the economy and the society. In the American case, the polls that tap the public’s views about the role of government show no systematic movement one way or the other during this period. The most exhaustive study of this question in Europe found little indication of an upward spiral of insatiable demands for more government. On the contrary, this study found some evidence that demands for egalitarian social policy and for interventionist economic management have declined since the 1970s. Some might recast the earlier argument and contend that excessively diminished expectations explain public discontent, while the performance of government and the political process has remained unchanged; but this argument is also hard to sustain.

How do we measure the “real” performance of government? We have already noted that observers in many countries, looking back over the past twenty or so years, report growing social problems in such domains as crime, drugs, education, persistent poverty, youth unemployment, and ethnic relations. Trilateral economies have likewise performed more poorly in the last two decades than in the preceding two decades. These conditions are unquestionably an important part of the explanation for the slump in public approval of government performance. Renewed prosperity would certainly improve public attitudes toward government, although we have little confidence that it would eliminate the disaffection that has emerged over the last two decades.

Many analysts would caution us at this point to distinguish between “outcomes” and “outputs,” that is between socioeconomic conditions and government policies. Socio-economic outcomes, like public attitudes, are only indirect indicators of government performance. As we have observed elsewhere, “to include social outcomes in an assessment of government performance is to commit the “Massachusetts Miracle Fallacy”: only a small part of the praise for the affluence of New England in the 1980S (and a similarly modest portion of the blame for the subsequent recession) was realistically attributable to the state government, despite 1988 presidential campaign rhetoric to the contrary. Governments do not deserve blame (or credit), the argument runs, for matters beyond their control.

This distinction can be carried too far, however. If the citizens of a Trilateral country join together through their national political process to accomplish certain “outcomes” and yet the “outputs” of government seem increasingly unable to accomplish those “outcomes,” then something important has changed and something important is wrong.

It is difficult to convert a general sense of increasing policy deadlocks and policy failures into a direct, clear and cross-national indicator of government performance. Perhaps the simplest evidence of policy deadlock can be found in the national financial accounts of our countries. During the last two decades government budget deficits as a fraction of gross domestic product have ballooned almost everywhere in the Trilateral world; Figure 1.4 summarizes this evidence. (In a few countries during specific periods the ratio of net public debt to gross domestic product did fall—Britain between 1975 and 1989 and Japan between 1984 and 1991 are the two most notable examples, but even these countries have experience growing debt-to-GDP ratios in the most recent years.) These growing public deficits suggest an inability of public institutions to make tough choices, either by controlling spending or by raising taxes. Moreover, as expenditures to service past debt rise, citizens are getting less in the way of current services for the same level of taxation.

Overview of this Volume
The evidence we have reviewed makes abundantly clear that over the last decade or two confidence in governments and political leaders has significantly declined virtually everywhere within the Trilateral world, even though the depth and timing of this decline has varied considerably from country to country. Moreover, although some commentators may wish to tell their fellow citizens that the problem is “just in your head”—a function of unrealistic expectations rather than deteriorating performance—we are inclined to think that our political systems are not, in fact, performing so well, although perhaps for reasons beyond their immediate control. These criticisms of governments and leaders do not necessarily translate into a “crisis of democracy,” threatening constitutional and representative government. On the other hand, the fact that representative democracy is not itself at risk does not imply that all is well with our political systems. Indeed, most of our fellow citizens believe that all is not well. Due regard for their views, as well as a prudent concern for the future, suggests that we should explore the reasons for this democratic discontent.

We fully acknowledge (and indeed in much of what follows, we emphasize) that different stories need to be told about different national experiences. Vietnam and Watergate are part of the American story; corruption as a consequence of long periods of one-party rule has been important in Japan, Italy, and perhaps even Britain; and constitutional struggles over regional issues are essential to understanding Canadian developments. We do not assume that an identical diagnosis applies in all our countries. On the other hand, there appears to be enough similarity in the malady for cross-national comparison to be enlightening. Why does democracy in all these countries in different ways seem to be working less well now than earlier?

Given our interest in exploring the commonalties among the three regions of the Trilateral community, we have chosen to organize the chapters of this study functionally, not geographically. That is, each of the following three chapters addresses a different family of diagnoses of the common illness.

Casanova’s chapter examines the role of international and economic factors, looking in particular at the changing circumstances of the nationstate. This diagnosis points in part to the globalization of our economies and societies. Interdependence has increased choice and prosperity in the aggregate, but it has also reduced the ability of national leaders to control their fate and that of their constituents. The rapid movement of goods, finance, people, pollutants, and ideas across national boundaries tends to destabilize representative institutions built to fit those national boundaries. There is, in short, a growing mismatch between the geography of our problems and the geography of our problem-solving mechanisms. These developments may also be related in complex ways to the general deterioration of Western economic prospects over the last several decades, with negative implications for popular evaluations of government. Unresolved disputes over fiscal policy, immigration, unemployment, poverty, inequality, and national identity have been exacerbated by the globalization of our economies. Finally, this chapter also explores the hypothesis that the end of the Cold War has changed the circumstances of our national governments in ways that have increased discontent with these governments.

Sato’s chapter departs from the observation that most of the everyday discussion in particular countries diagnosing democratic ills (and prescribing therapies) relates to particular institutional arrangements, such as electoral systems. We find such interpretations implausible on their face, disconfirmed by the obvious fact that broadly similar democratic discontents have arisen in countries with highly diverse institutional arrangements. No single institutional reform seems likely to solve the problem everywhere—or indeed anywhere. Instead, this chapter explores the broad question of the balance (institutionally manifested in different ways in each country) between the articulation of interests and their aggregation into coherent policy strategies, as well as the tradeoff between accountability and consensus. One purpose of this chapter is to “deparochialize” national debates about democratic discontents that are too narrowly focused on institutional details.

Putnam’s chapter explores changes in civil society that have increased pressures on government, degraded democratic deliberation, and reduced democratic accountability. Political parties are being supplanted by “videocracy” and opinion polls as intermediaries between citizens and government. In at least some countries bonds of community have been frayed by economic, social, technological, and even philosophical change. The sociological preconditions for informed, responsible, civil conversation about public affairs have been undermined, and in its place has emerged a kind of plebiscitary pseudo-direct democracy. This chapter explores possible means of revitalizing civic engagement and reconnecting citizens with one another and with their government.

Contrary to both the sneers of its opponents and the fears of some adherents, democratic government has proved remarkably capable of creative adaptation to changing circumstances. In the century now drawing to a close, democracy itself has faced graver threats than those described in this report. Our analysis leads us to warn about new challenges—international, institutional, social, economic, and technological—that face our public institutions today, but our reflections do not lead us ultimately to pessimistic conclusions, for democracy itself has important self-curative powers. Addressing the challenges sketched in this report will, however, require creativity, insight and leadership. Our purpose here is to stimulate renewed and focused efforts to revitalize the Trilateral democracies.

© 1995 Robert D. Putnam | from Trilateral Commission Task Force Report #47