ABSTRACT
Institutional confidence has become a major concern of both political scientists and policy-makers. An increasing number of studies have detected a decline in citizens’ confidence in contemporary democracies which seems to encompass not only officeholders and parties but also, and perhaps more disturbingly, the political institutions themselves (Norris 1999c; Dalton 1999; Pharr, Putnam, and Dalton 2000b; Newton and Norris, 2000). As Torcal and Montero argue in the Introduction to this volume, lack of confidence in political institutions does not necessarily entail a lack of public support for democratic institutions or for the democratic regime as a whole. However, if, as they suggest, we treat lack of confidence as a symptom of institutional disaffection (a belief ‘about the lack of responsiveness of the political authorities [representatives] and institutions’) a low level of confidence in institutions would signal the presence of lived and perceived gaps between the interests of citizens and those of their representatives, which are in turn likely to be associated with low levels of political engagement, involvement, or efficacy. In other words, they suggest that we are in the presence of potential deficits in the quality of democratic rule that merit serious investigation.
