A quarter-century of declining confidence

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 11, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 24-25

  Pharr, Susan J ^a   Putnam, Robert D ^a   Dalton, Russell J ^b  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 24944550608     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2000.0043     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 2.
2. Polls do not, in fact, generally confirm the thesis that ordinary citizens' views about the proper role of government have shifted nearly as much as has the climate of elite opinion. Equally important, however, there is little survey evidence that citizens have become more insistent on government action in recent decades.
3. Pippa Norris, ed., Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
4. Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Dieter Fuchs, eds., Citizens and the States, Vol. 1 of Beliefs in Government, Kenneth Newton, ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);
5. Max Kaase and Kenneth Newton, eds., Beliefs in Government, Vol. 5 of Beliefs in Government, Kenneth Newton, ed.
6. The most comprehensive assessment of the evidence for declining confidence in government in the United States, as well as initial evaluations of alternative explanations, is Joseph S. Nye, Philip D. Zelikow, and David C. King, eds., Why People Don't Trust Government (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
7. Martin Wattenberg, The Decline of American Political Parties (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996);
8. Joseph S. Nye, Philip D. Zelikow, and David C. King, eds., Why People Don't Trust Government.
9. Seymour Martin Lipset, "American Democracy in Comparative Perspective," in Robert S. Leiken, ed., A New Moment in the American (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994);
10. Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider, The Confidence Gap (New York: Free Press, 1983).
11. Harris Poll, February 1994. Although systematic data on political alienation in America before the advent of regular national surveys in the 1950s are sketchy, some evidence suggests that alienation had declined from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s. See Robert E. Lane, "The Politics of Consensus in an Age of Affluence," American Political Science Review 59 (December 1965): 874-95.
12. Harris Poll, February 1994.
13. Roger Jowell and Richard Topf, "Trust in the Establishment," in Roger Jowell, Sharon Witherspoon, and Lindsay Brook, eds., British Social Attitudes: The 5th Report (Brookfield, Vt.: Gower Publishing, 1988).
14. A longer time series asking about the honesty and ethics of members of Parliament is available from British Gallup. In 1982, only 26 percent of the British public gave MPs a low or very low score on this scale, but this increased to 43 percent in 1993. A similar question asked by Canadian Gallup shows an increase in negative sentiments from 39 percent in 1982 to 49 percent in 1992 (Hastings and Hastings, eds., Index to International Public Opinion [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994], 312).