Problems of Democracies
The central thesis of the assignment, was that the Trilateral democracies were becoming overloaded by increasingly insistent demands from an ever-expanding array of participants, raising fundamental issues of governability. Within that common framework, the some authors offered somewhat distinct diagnoses of the problems facing their respective regions. In Europe, you can see the upwelling of social mobilization, the collapse of traditional institutions and values, the resulting loss of social control, and governments' limited room for acting. America was absorbed by a "democratic surge" that had produced political polarization, demands for more equality and participation, and less effective political parties and government. So the cure for it was to "restore the balance" between democracy and governability. By contrast Japan did not face problems of "excessive" democracy, thanks in part to rapid economic growth and in part to its larger reservoir of traditional values. Whatever the regional and national nuances, however, the authors sketched a grim outlook for democracy in the Trilateral countries: delegitimated leadership, expanded demands, overloaded government, political competition that was both
North America. The onset and depth of this disillusionment vary from country to country, but the downtrend is longest and clearest in the United States, where polling has produced the most abundant and systematic evidence. 4 (The evidence from Canada, if less abundant and dramatic, conforms to this general picture.) 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 "just about always." Such a response would sound unbelievably quaint to most people today. This decline in confidence followed a decade or more of exceptionally turbulent political conflict--the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and Watergate and its successor scandals--that transformed American politics. Third-party challengers for the presidency, divided government, a term-limits movement, and other political developments signaled the public's increasing disenchantment with the political status quo. 5 Public confidence in the ability and benevolence of government has fallen steadily over this period. The decline was briefly interrupted by the "It's Morning in America" prosperity of the Reagan administration, and even more briefly by victory in the Gulf War, but confidence in government ended up lower after 12 years of Republican rule. Indeed, of the total decline, roughly half occurred under Republican administrations and half under Democratic ones. The economic prosperity of the late 1990s has seen an uptick in confidence in government, but the figures still remain well below those of the 1970s, not to mention those of the halcyon days of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In historical perspective, the sense of crisis that permeated The Crisis of Democracy may have reflected the confluence of two factors: first, the surge of radical political activism that swept the advanced industrial democracies in the 1960s, which began with the civil rights and antiwar movements in United States and had the effect in the events of May 1968 in France, Italy's "Hot Autumn" later that year, and student upheavals in Japan; and second, the economic upheavals triggered by the oil crisis of 1973-74 that were to result in more than a decade of higher inflation, slower growth, and, in many countries, worsening unemployment. The Trilateral governments were thus trapped between rising demands from citizens and declining resources to meet those demands. Moreover, the legitimacy of governments was suspect in the eyes of a generation whose motto was: "Question Authority." CH&W warned that these ominous developments posed a threat to democracy itself. Political Parties. For more than a century, political parties have played a central role in the theory and practice of democratic government. To be sure, classical philosophers conceived of democracy as a kind of unmediated popular sovereignty in which "the people" rule directly, but they had in mind the context of a small city-state and never imagined that democratic government could function in societies as large and complex as today's Trilateral nations. This hurdle of scale was overcome by the greatest modern political innovation--representative democracy--which required intermediary institutions to link citizens to their government, to aggregate the increasingly diverse universe of conflicting social and economic interests into coherent public policies, and to ensure the accountability of rulers to the ruled. With the advent of universal suffrage, these functions came to be performed by political parties throughout the democratic world.
Some common words found in the essay are:
Thatcher Recruit, Denmark Iceland, Joseph Schumpeter, Berlin Wall, Crisis Democracy, Political Confidence, Gulf War, European Union, , Party LDP, political parties, advanced industrial, trilateral democracies, advanced industrial democracies, industrial democracies, political institutions, university press, democratic government, governmental performance, political leaders, confidence government, philip zelikow david, zelikow david king, nye philip zelikow, joseph nye philip,
Approximate Word count = 8009
Approximate Pages = 32 (250 words per page double spaced)
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