Political Mistrust and the Discrediting of Politicians International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology Editors Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo Rubin Patterson Masamichi Sasaki VOLUME 96 Political Mistrust and the Discrediting of Politicians Edited by Mattei Dogan BRILL LEIDEN•BOSTON 2005 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record of this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISSN 0074-8684 ISBN 90 04 14530 3 © Copyright 2005 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands Contents attei ogan 1 M D Introduction: Political Mistrust as a Worldwide Phenomenon I Comparative Analyses attei ogan 11 M D fi Erosion of Con dence in Thirty European Democracies imothy ower iselle amison 55 T J. P and G J Political Mistrust in Latin America illiam ase 81 W C Political Mistrust in Southeast Asia ighard eckel 101 S N Political Scandals fi II Contrasting Cases of National Con gurations of Trust-Mistrust rygve ulbrandsen 115 T G Norway: Trust Among Elites in a Corporatist Democracy attei ogan 137 M D France: Political Mistrust and the Civil Death of Politicians ean ascal aloz 155 J -P D Nigeria: Trust Your Patron, not the Institutions III From Mistrust to Crisis of Legitimacy rederick urner arita arballo 175 F C. T and M C Argentina: Economic Disaster and the Rejection of the Political Class attei ogan 207 M D How Civil War Was Avoided in France 245 Analytic Index Introduction “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” (Churchill,1947). This statement is so often cited because it expresses in a few words a feeling shared by the majority of citizens in all established democracies, and because it reflects the diagnosis formulated by dozens of philosophers, historians, sociologists, and experienced politicians: all societies advanced and developing, large and small, mature democracies and pseudo-democ- racies are full of dysfunctions generating political mistrust. But such an ubiquity does not stem from an epidemic sickness. If a phenomenon is present in so many countries, nourished in each one independently, then we are facing an important feature of contemporary politics. Empirical evidence on political mistrust is available for almost one hundred nations, generated by many national surveys conducted over decades, and also by international surveys, particularly the World Values Surveys, the European Values Surveys, the Latin American Barometer. Trustworthiness is an empirically grounded concept. Very few countries in the world today are immune to political mistrust. A society where all individuals would mistrust all others is sociologically inconceivable because it would rapidly dismember, dislocate, or disband. In fact, all countries could be ranked on a scale of trust-mistrust, as indicated in the follow- ing text and which proposes a threshold based on the potential frequency of misconduct separating a culture of trust from a culture of mistrust: Democratic principles institutionalize distrust: they assume that trust can be breached and provide correctives for that. The fact that this is activated indicates that trust had in fact been breached. As long as corrective mech- anisms happen sporadically, exceptionally, as a last resort, the culture of trust is not undermined, but rather enhanced by the proofs of effective accountability. But there is some threshold where this may backfire and the trend reverses itself. Hyperactivity of correctives indicates that there is per- haps too much to correct. For example, if people constantly resort to liti- gation and the courts are flooded with suits, if the Ombudsman is overloaded 2 • Introduction with claims, if the police is overworked and prisons overcrowded, if the media constantly detect and censure political corruption, and citizens denounce or revoke their representatives – then the culture of trust may break down. To be pervasive and lasting, generalized trust cannot be due merely to efficient controls. Rather, it must see it in the potentiality of controls only the ultimate defense against unlikely and rare abuses of trust. Institutionalized distrust breeds spontaneous trust most effectively as long as it remains at the level of institutionalization, and does not turn into actual, routine prac- tice. This is the specification of our paradox of democracy: the extensive potentiality of controls must be matched by their very limited actualization. Institutionalized distrust must remain in the shadows, as a distant protective framework for spontaneous actions. (Piotr Sztompka, Trust, Distrust, and the Paradox of Democracy, European Journal of Social Theory, 1998, 1) This symposium does not include a chapter on the USA. For this coun- try rich empirical evidence has been compiled. It has been the object of significant theoretical interpretations of political mistrust. I do not see how a chapter on the USA in this book would reveal anything really new. Consequently, priority has been given to other countries less well studied. This country remains nonetheless, at least implicitly, a point of reference for comparative research. Thus, it would be useful to recall here the American experience, by citing two scholarly testimonies. The United States had experienced four troubled presidencies in a row. The previous two decades had been marked by an unrelenting sequence of crises: assassination, racial and social conflict, foreign policy disaster, political scan- dal, and economic disruption. The public turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s in many ways resembled the crises of the 1930s and 1940s, with one major difference. The New Deal and World War II entailed triumphant assertions of federal power. They demonstrated that, given the right leadership and a sense of collective purpose, government could be made to work. And so Americans came out of those decades with a sense of renewed confidence in institutions generally and in government specifically. Vietnam, Watergate, the energy crisis, recession, and hyperinflation demonstrated that our insti- tutions generally, and the federal government in particular had failed to per- form. The result, as documented in this book, was a collapse of confidence in those running our institutions. (S.M. Lipset and W. Schneider,The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor, and Government in the Public Mind, 1987, p. 436) Confidence in the government has declined. In 1964, three-quarters of the American public said that they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. Today only a quarter of the Americans admit to such trust...The top reasons given for distrusting government are that it is inefficient, wastes money, and spends on the wrong things...Government is not alone. Over the past three decades public confidence has dropped in Introduction • 3 half for many major institutions...The United States was founded with a mistrust of government . The American Constitution was deliberately set up in such a way that a King George could never rule over us again. And some might add, ‘Nor anybody else’...If you ask Americans what is the best place in the world to live, 80 percent say the United States. If you ask them whether they like their democratic system of government, 90 percent say yes...Most people do not feel that the system is rotten and has to be overthrown. (J.S. Nye, PhD, Zelikow, David C. King (eds) Why People Don’t Trust Government, 1997, pp. 1-3) In the beginning of the sixties, 85 percent of Americans considered the performance of their political institutions as the most important factor in their national pride, while at the same time, only 3 percent of Italians indicated that political institutions were the basis for their national pride, giving priority to other aspects such as the physical beauty of the coun- try, its artistic treasures and the character of its people (Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture, pp. 102 and 248) About thirty years later in July 1995, in a survey conducted jointly by two institutes; one connected to the Democratic Party, the other to the Republican Party, American citizens reproached the government with wasting the taxpayers’ money (93 percent), of making fallacious electoral promises (88 percent), of voting for laws favoring immigrants over American citizens, etc. In their book, The Confidence Gap, Lipset and Schneider, after having stressed Americans’ traditional pride regarding governmental institutions, painfully admitted that during the last quarter of the century, confidence in these institutions had fallen to a deplorable level. Formerly, Americans thought “they lived in the best society in the world” (Almond and Verba). But in the last twenty years, two-thirds of American citizens said they were discontented with the functioning of the regime (Gallup Report, 1973-1990). In 1988, only 16 percent of Americans had “a lot of confidence” in the federal government (as against 41 percent in 1966); only 15 percent felt the same about the Congress (as against 42 percent in 1966); only 15 percent felt the same about the Congress (as against 42 percent in 1966); 13per- cent had confidence in the unions (as against 22 percent in 1966); 17per- cent in religious institutions (against 41 percent in 1966); 19 percent in big business (against 55 percent in 1966); 32 percent in the SupremeCourt (against 50 percent in 1966; 33 percent in the army (against 61 percent in 1966). (Harris Institute, April 1988, cf. I.I.O.P 1988-1989, p. 279) Every two years between 1973 and 1983, and annually since 1984, the Gallup Institute has asked a national sample how much confidence they had in ten selected institutions. In these surveys, Congress rankedin the sixth or seventh position after the church, the army, the Supreme Court, banks, and public schools. However, Congress inspired more 4 • Introduction confidence than big business, television journalists, union leaders or news- papers. A Harris Poll survey in 1980 of people aged 25-40 living in cities stressed that the institution that offered the least satisfaction was the political leadership (72 percent), (I.I.O.P 1980-1, p. 418). This survey was conducted soon after the pessimistic speech by president Jimmy Carter. Addressing the nation on July 15, 1979, he stated that the crisis of confidence revealed by the surveys “constituted a danger for democracy” because of “the gap between the government and the people.” Between 1966 and 1993 all institutions slid down the slope of confidence. In a 1985 Gallup Institute survey on honesty and ethical principles in 25 pro- fessional categories, senators ranked lower than 14 other professionals, and members of the House of Representatives raked 18th. In 1988, “the representatives of the people” carried less esteem than real estate agents, newspaper journalists or funeral parlor directors, however they were judged better than sales people and small real estate agents. These two surveys confirmed the results of other surveys conducted throughout the United States. The categories for which ethics were judged to be the most negative in 1981, 1983, and 1987 were high-level federal civil ser- vants, senators and members of the House of Representatives, state gov- ernors, municipal leaders and union leaders, while scientists, doctors, and professors enjoyed high esteem or at least a good standing. This detailed empirical evidence may serve as points for comparisons. Is the erosion of confidence more profound in the United States than in most European democracies? Given the internal diversity in Europe it is extremely difficult to reply to such a question. In comparison to Norway or the other Scandinavian countries, the reply would be affirmative. In comparison with other European countries the reply may be negative. The available American documentation shows that a pluralist democracy can become accustomed to a lack of confidence in institutions, that the mistrust of citizens can become chronic, that political regimes can per- sist in spite of the loss of confidence of a large part of the citizenry, that democracy can continue to function in spite of persistent dysfunctions, that it can continue to live as do some people suffering from a chronic illness. Forty years of surveys attest to this loss of confidence but not of legitimacy. What is still missing in the literature is a comprehensive cross-Atlantic comparison. Such a comparison cannot be undertaken here, but when it will be attempted will have to retain the same factors and parame- ters, particularly the following: decline of traditional values; decline of primate institutions (Gemeinschaft, family, parenthood); decline of ide- ologies; increasing governmental overload; increasing mass communica- tion and information; increasing popular expectations; increasing visibility