Why look back at a study done eight years ago? Because it is a pretty classic case of self-proclaimed public intellectuals from academe (in this case Robert Putnam) managing to impose strictures on their debates, and thereby hamstring their own efforts to contribute to the health of democratic discourse.
Post-World War II decolonization (especially in Vietnam) was an era of bloody injustices that fed civic outrage and political backlash, and was especially intense in Europe in 1968. In America, the same peace movements produced a counterattack (Nixonian politics) and a counterbacklash (Nixon's impeachment). That period of whipsaw politics was the backdrop for the Trilateral Commission's gloomy, hypertechnocratic Crisis of Democracy report in 1975. (In its opening paragraph, CoD put democratic citizens in the back seat: "They [trilateral governments] have brought the comforts -- and the anxieties -- of middle-class status to a growing majority of their peoples.")
In 2000, it was entirely appropriate that Pharr, Putnam, and other survey contributors to this volume would contrast their new trilateral survey with the speculative ruminations Huntington, Crozier and Watanuki in 1975's Crisis of Democracy. But in 2008, this study seems even more tepid than it already sounded on first publication.
It may in part be the subject matter: Street protests, violent or non, became passe after Nixon and Vietnam, and were rendered increasingly unremarkable by our media-glutted era. Today, they are now effectively replaced by political factionalism gone online and viral. In 2000 there was little attention directed at this in academia. It would take another year for any scholar of government to speak directly to the major shift that the internet had already induced, namely, the polarized politics made possible by the self-reinforcing political subcultures the net built. (Pippa Norris' 2001 Digital Divide and Cass Sunstein's 2002 Republic dot com were the first cuts in academia at this theme.) The data-driven "rigor" espoused by these authors helped them to miss the trend almost entirely, and was possibly the proverbial case of the drunk who searched for his missing keys under the light. Retrospectively, we see that the DD contributors were still responding primarily to the couch-potatodom (i.e. declinine in participation) wrought for a decade by unidirectional cable TV punditry. In any event, even with as big a name as Bob Putnam behind it, this study has amounted to much less of a "landmark" piece of social commentary than Crisis of Democracy was eventually proclaimed to be.
Still, the larger structural points the authors make are solid, important and still highly relevant, but not particularly deep. How often have scholar-pollsters in the States really thought hard about how Americans' attitudes are permanently adapting to the diminished role of their government on the world stage? For the European pollsters, marching headlong toward some soon-to-be scuttled EU constitution, it was of the utmost importance. The study corroborated the Zeitgeist of frustration among democratic citizens that has taken hold as the maneuver room waned for their statesmen and women to conduct policy abroad. That is to say, our bodies politic are deeply disgruntled about the coalition-driven foreign policies that are the natural adaptations of overburdened governments. 1975's Crisis fo Democracy was written after the oil shock of 1973 first triggered a civic awakening on this theme, and back then it was termed "interdependence." Today, we call it "globalization." (In the late imperial era before World War II, it was termed "resource-dependency." From 1989 to 1996, the heyday of cable, there was, for a brief time, the in-between moniker, "the global village.") All of this amped up levels of distrust in government in the post-Cold War period, as citizens recognized that many international decisions they could have cared less about before (like import penetration and tax breaks for multinational corporations) had suddenly been banished from their parties' agendas. Ralf Dahrendorf ably condensed these findings in the 2000 study into a single statement in its afterword: "Inactivity at the bottom represents the flip side of creeping authoritarianism at the top, and it strengthens that trend."
Eight years after this 2000 study, what do we find? First, citizens are for now reempowered and resurgent, more active in politics, and making able use of the leverage the internet to understand trends and shape them. Second, though, discontent with office-holders is still intensifying -- the internet threw open the curtains on democratic leadership. Yes, one way of reading the trend is that the net is a good enforcer of political transparency in government. One can also reach a very different conclusion. As the net enlarges the scope of what is under scrutiny in political offices, for the first time, it is allowing real-time monitoring of officials who are exercising all-important oversight powers within government. (Double oversight.) Until today, there had been an abiding public deference and ignorance about how oversight happens, and a frequent assumption that these offices would generally exercise neutrality in their deliberations. Oversight offices are, after all, the chief means of ensuring accountability (and a minority voice) in government decision-making between elections, the chief means of "checking" irreversible rot. The net's exposure means some of those positions are now perceived as mere paper tigers. And in the truly worst cases, roles of this sort can be devoid of independence, made subject to loyalty tests and politicized, and populated with gatekeepers for the parties in power. Similarly, the net has permitted the public to have more intense exposure of the workings of public law. Today, investigative stories on the net have imparted wider-spread awareness that constitutional powers of government are an eroding form of received "traditions" about democracy. They are less central to policy decisions in a democracy than have been a variety of other undocumented and unofficial powers and prods of political office.
