Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I The Marketplace of Ideas
- 1 Democracies in Disarray
- 2 The Idea of a Marketplace
- Part II The Great Twentieth-Century Governing Ideas
- Part III Rhetoric and Government: Understanding Public Policy and Elections
- Part IV Making Democracy Work
- Notes
- References
- Index
1 - Democracies in Disarray
from Part I - The Marketplace of Ideas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I The Marketplace of Ideas
- 1 Democracies in Disarray
- 2 The Idea of a Marketplace
- Part II The Great Twentieth-Century Governing Ideas
- Part III Rhetoric and Government: Understanding Public Policy and Elections
- Part IV Making Democracy Work
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Opinion surveys taken in many countries around the world have been reporting a common finding: Majorities of record or near-record proportions expressing dissatisfaction with or pessimism about their countries’ political and economic performance and their own personal prospects…. [These] high levels of public dissatisfaction are also being found in that most prosperous, free, and stable group of countries, the advanced industrial democracies. The reports coming out of them read as though each is experiencing a unique national malaise, but taken together these reports tell a remarkably similar story.
- Everett C. LaddAfter the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet-style communism, the old bipolar world system suddenly disappeared and the West basked in triumph. To some observers this was by no means a foregone conclusion. For example, Samuel Huntington argued as late as the mid-1980s that “the likelihood of democratic development in Eastern Europe is virtually nil” (Huntington 1984: 217). To others, most notably Francis Fukuyama, the momentous events signaled the “triumph of the West, of the Western idea” What we may be witnessing, he wrote, “is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.“
These sentiments proved to be rather short-lived, however. Western triumphalism quickly came to an end as a bloody civil war erupted in Yugoslavia and a prolonged economic recession put millions of people out of work in the industrial world. Unemployment trends put the number of jobless Europeans alone at 20 million by 1995, about a quarter of them young people between 18 and 25.2 An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report released in 1995 projected unacceptably high unemployment levels to continue in Europe beyond the year 2000.3 Social unrest, ethnic strife, and rampant nationalism have spread while political leaders, often beset by scandals and corruption, seem helpless and devoid of ideas about how to confront - and much less solve - today's pressing problems.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Democracy and the Marketplace of IdeasCommunication and Government in Sweden and the United States, pp. 3 - 26Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997