What Gives Politics Such a Bad Name?

Abstract

This paper discusses the erosive impact of a shift from a politics of conflict, of polarised partisan representation to valence politics, a politics of performance, delivery and widespread policy consensus in advanced Western democracies. It is argued that consensus politics undermines the structuring role of political parties in the representation of societal conflict and hence results in diminishing interest, intensity and respect for politicians, parties and parliaments. It points towards a political rather than a sociological explanation of declining political trust.

Keywords:

• political trust
• diffuse support
• representation
• parties
• Schattschneider
• valence politics

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Eddie Hyland not only for his comments on this paper, but also for his support, intellectual stimulation and critical insights over the past 15 years.

Notes

Admittedly, the financial crisis and budgets cuts have led to mass protests in some European countries, most notably Greece, Spain and France, but there is little to suggest that these protests are threatening regimes, or indeed that any of these protests are related to long-term trends of growing disaffection with politicians, parties and parliaments.

The distinction between trust in people and confidence in institutions is emphasised strongly in the literature on social and political trust (see Zmerli & Newton, 2008: 709), although the wording in questionnaires does not systematically use ‘trust’ whenever measuring attitudes towards people, and ‘confidence’ whenever measuring attitudes towards institutions. Also, principal component analysis (carried out by the author on British and Irish Election Studies) indicates that measures of ‘trust in politicians’, ‘trust in parties’ and ‘trust in parliament’ tend to load heavily on a single underlying component, which is distinctive from a second component that comprises items such as ‘duty to vote’ and ‘satisfaction with democracy’. Hence, there is good reason to believe that political trust is a single dimension that contains attitudes to office holders and institutions but is separate from general appreciation of democracy.

While Clarke et al. (2004) can certainly not be faulted on their methodology in testing attitudes to democracy, they do seem to understate the problem resulting from changes in British Election Study survey questions that measure trust in institutions. These have varied substantially over recent decades and render any claim of time trends in general questionable. In Norris's (2011: Ch. 4) case, she presents a picture of volatility rather than any systematic trends in attitudes towards politicians and institutions across European countries, but the Eurobarometer data she uses appear overly noisy, producing inexplicably upwards or downwards movements from one year to the next of up to 20%. Why, for example, would ‘trust in parliament’ in West Germany rise by 18% from 2006 to 2007 (36–54%) and fall again by as much as 11% in the following year? Nothing happened in Germany at that time that could possibly account for such extreme movements in public opinion.

Newton (2001: 204) does point out that whereas ‘social trust is associated, if at all, with social variables measuring social and economic success, political trust is rather more strongly associated with a set of political variables measuring interest in politics, pride in the national political system, a belief in open government, a low priority given to social order and the left-right scale’.