When Gordon Brown, in one of his first acts as prime minister, issued his green paper "The Governance of Britain," he was in part responding to the view, commonplace in the political class, that there is a "crisis of disengagement" from politics.
What is less commonly acknowledged is that this disengagement is close to being a general phenomenon across "mature" and even not so mature democracies. While British commentators sounded the alarm when voter turnout dipped below 60 per cent in the 2001 general election, few noticed that this was part of a wider trend. Historic postwar lows in electoral turnout were also recorded in the Netherlands in 1998, in Austria and Portugal in 1999, in Spain in 2000, in Italy in 2001, in Ireland in 2002 and in Germany in 2005. British political parties have been haemorrhaging members at the rate of about one every 12 minutes since 1980. But party membership among the democracies of western Europe almost halved between 1980 and 2000. The British public's trust in government has almost halved since the mid-1970s. But the decline has been more rapid in Italy, and many more Swedes, Finns, Austrians and Germans now think their politicians lose touch with voters as soon as they are elected than was the case 30 years ago.
The ubiquity of the trend across markedly different societies and political systems underlines the main objection to the conventional wisdom about democratic disengagement—that it is the fault of governments and politicians. Some accounts focus on particular scandals (cash for peerages and so on) or crises that have damaged public confidence. Others stress the declining performance of governments. On this view, citizens have lost trust in government simply because government is doing less to earn it. In the US, the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, with its relentless focus on the idea that Washington isn't working, is built squarely on this theme. Obama taps into a public belief that politics used to be a nobler, more ambitious enterprise than it is today. "It's not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most," he has said often on the stump. "It's the smallness of our politics."
The fact that disappointment with politics has grown can scarcely be doubted. But the extent to which poorer performance by governments is to blame is much more questionable. Governments may do things differently today—relying more on regulation and less on direct control—and in some cases they do different things—becoming more active in some areas, and less active in others—but it is not clear that overall their performance has deteriorated. In fact, on many measures, governments today are doing much better than their predecessors a generation ago. For example, Britain's performance on strikes, unemployment, inflation, economic growth and crime—all big issues in the "governability" debate of the 1970s—has been much improved in the 1990s and 2000s.
So if the performance of particular politicians or political institutions, or the salience of specific crises, is not at the root of the problem—what is?
The first is that citizens are more used to getting their own way. They have more freedom than earlier generations over which jobs to take, where to live or go on holiday, the goods they buy and the food they eat, even who they fall in love with. It is easy to dismiss this as "consumerism," but it reflects a desire for greater autonomy and self-expression—a desire that has been at the root of many of the projects of both left and right for a century.
The second is that as the urgency of people's immediate material needs has receded, the demands placed on government have become more varied. Despite the Thatcherite aspiration to "roll back the frontiers of the state," states across Europe are more widely involved in some aspects of our lives than they were 30 years ago. This is not a bureaucratic conspiracy; it is a response to the demands of publics that no longer focus solely on the "pocketbook politics" issues of jobs and taxes. Those issues remain important, but they have been joined by a broader array of "post-materialist" concerns—from the environment to identity politics. Amid this complexity, governments find it harder to keep everyone happy.
The third is the familiar "decline of deference." With the shadows of mass conflict and acute economic insecurity lifted from their lives, most people's respect for traditional forms of public authority has waned. This might be less challenging if it were accompanied by a decline in expectations about what public authority can achieve. But in fact the reverse is true: we expect more, not less, from government. A 1999 survey in Britain reveals the contradiction: 62 per cent agreed that, "The government does not trust ordinary people to make their own decisions about dangerous activities," yet almost exactly the same number—61 per cent—agreed that, "The government should do more to protect people by passing laws banning dangerous activities."
The fourth is that several of the social institutions that once mobilised people into politics, such as trade unions and churches, have been weakened. New organisations have emerged in their place. But in catering more effectively to this changed values landscape—citizens who are more demanding, care about a wider range of issues and share a greater suspicion of authority—they have emphasised a model of social change in which progress comes from challenging the system rather than working through it, so that the energies of social movements have not been quite the source of political renewal that they were in earlier periods.
Taken together, these changes point to the paradox at the heart of our predicament: people's attachment to democratic values—to the principle of self-expression, to the idea of being "authors of their own scripts"—has never been greater, yet this is precisely what makes their disappointment with formal democratic institutions all the more likely. There is a disconnect between personal choices, which seem easy, immediate and responsive, and collective choices, which seem difficult, slow and convoluted.
But clearing up one part of the puzzle exposes another. Why does this disconnect seem to have been more painfully revealed in some countries than in others? The answer seems to have something to do with democratic culture. The idea that the effectiveness of democratic institutions depends on the culture that surrounds them is a very old one. But there has been a tendency to rely on a restrictive, Tocquevilleian account of where that culture comes from. Of course, the vibrancy of associational life matters, but as an account of where democratic habits and expectations can develop, it is incomplete. In particular, it overlooks the potential contribution to democratic renewal of a wider range of everyday settings in which people actually live their lives, from families and workplaces to public services. By empowering people in the right ways in these domains, some countries seem to have done a better job than others of increasing the public appetite for and commitment to more formal democratic processes.
The conclusion is borne out in new research published by the think tank Demos at the end of January. Using data from 25 European countries, we have developed what we call an "Everyday Democracy index" (EDI) that seeks to measure how well different countries have managed to strengthen this sense of both personal and collective possibility.
Of course, the idea of trying to measure and compare democracies is not novel. The American organisation Freedom House has been doing it for years. But it focuses on a narrow set of minimum conditions for representative democracy. If you want to know the difference between Belgian democracy and Burmese democracy, that is useful. But if you're more interested in the difference between Finland and France, it isn't. What differentiates democracies in Europe is not so much the strength with which formal political rights are protected—which is pretty strongly in all of them—but the character of their democratic culture as it manifests itself in both formal and more informal settings.
It is these more subtle differences that the EDI allows us to compare, by scoring countries on the democratic empowerment they afford across six dimensions, from the traditional end of electoral and procedural rights, civic activism and democratic deliberation, to the less traditional domains of family life, workplaces and public services.
Some striking patterns emerge from our initial results. First, there is a very high level of consistency in how countries perform on these different dimensions. This supports our central claim that the cultures and orientations of different, ostensibly very disconnected spheres of public and private life can actually be mutually supportive.
Second, this consistency manifests itself in a clear geographical pattern, with the Scandinavian countries generally near the top, followed roughly by northern Europe, Mediterranean Europe and central and eastern Europe.
Third, below a certain level, countries' scores map very closely on to GDP per capita, which may support a "hierarchy of needs" account of rising affluence producing greater demand for self-expression and empowerment. But above that level, societies at similarly high levels of development display quite divergent outcomes in democratic empowerment.
Finally, there is a very strong connection between countries' scores on the EDI and other indicators of national success, including levels of life satisfaction, social trust, tolerance and equality. To what extent these relationships are causes or consequences, or a bit of both, is for future research to determine.
Britain's performance in this comparative perspective is a mixed bag, and assessments depend to some extent on the benchmark used. Overall it comes in eighth, just ahead of France and Germany—a stronger performance than might be expected. On the other hand, 13 of the 17 countries behind Britain—Spain, Portugal and Greece and the ten central and east European accession countries—only became democracies quite recently, and the gap between Britain and countries at the top of the table is significant. Areas of weak performance in some areas—such as electoral and procedural democracy, where Britain is dragged down by poor voter turnout—are compensated for by strong performance in others, such as "family democracy," which explores how free people feel they are to choose the kind of family structures and roles within them that they want.
These findings do not rule out Gordon Brown's institutional reforms, some of which are overdue. But they suggest that alongside these we would do well to pay more attention to how the patterns and arrangements of everyday life give rise to democratic habits. Of course, understanding these patterns better does not necessarily mean that government will be easily able to influence them. To speak of distinct democratic "cultures" would not make sense unless they reflected deeply rooted differences in national character and traditions that are not easily changed by politics.
But in the longer term, cultures do change and politics can play a role in shaping the process, even if only by acting as a lightning rod for currents originating within society itself. One example is in the workplace. Research shows that employees' perceptions of their autonomy and influence have a major effect on their job satisfaction, and even on their health. Given that most of us spend a good chunk of our adult life at work, it is likely that there is considerable spillover from the degree of influence we experience in our jobs to our wider sense of empowerment—a view the EDI seems to confirm. There are major limits to what government can do to affect this directly, but it can use its agenda-setting power to focus public attention on the issue, shame bad performers or lend credibility to other agents of change.
By itself, changing how political institutions look will not change how people feel about them. But finding ways—however slow and incremental—to increase people's sense of empowerment in their everyday lives could, in the long term, prove a more promising way to restore their faith in politics.
