Political confidence in representative democracies: Socio-cultural vs. political explanations

In the past 25 years political scientists have repeatedly claimed the emergence of a crisis of political confidence amongst western publics. In the 1970s, for example, the postwar era of unprecedented economic growth, prosperity, and security came to an end and neo-Marxists, neo-Liberals, and neo-Conservatives alike, claimed that the economic decline and everincreasing, contradictory public demands would lead to a major crisis of political confidence in the western world (Crozier et al. 1975; Kaase and Newton 1995).