Journal Article

The Democratic Disconnect

Mounk, Yascha, Foa, Roberto Stefan

2016

Overview

Three decades ago, most scholars simply assumed that the Soviet Union would remain stable. This assumption was suddenly proven false. Today, people have even greater confidence in the durability of the world's affluent, consolidated democracies. Most political scientists, however, have steadfastly declined to view these trends as an indication of structural problems in the functioning of liberal democracy, much less as a threat to its very existence. A wide range of leading scholars, including Ronald Inglehart, Pippa Norris, Christian Welzel, and Russell J. Dalton, have generally interpreted these trends as benign indications of the increasing political sophistication of younger generations of \"critical\" citizens who are less willing to defer to traditional elites. Citizens in a number of supposedly consolidated democracies in North America and Western Europe have not only grown more critical of their political leaders. People can have an abstract allegiance to \"democracy\" while simultaneously rejecting many key norms and institutions that have traditionally been regarded as necessary ingredients of democratic governance.

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: Allegiance / Citizens / Democracy / Elites / Governance / Intellectuals / Legitimacy / Liberal democracy / Political scientists / Politics / Religion & politics / Sophistication / Trends / Trust