ABSTRACT
David Easton acknowledged that the applicability of the concept depends on the validity of the assumption that people can be aware of a relationship between their needs, wants and demands on the one hand and the behavior of the political authorities on the other. Easton contended that “people are far more interested in specific policies and the specific actions of authorities than their lack of knowledge about electoral issues would seem to imply.” In the mid 1970s Robert Entman and his associates criticized most mainstream studies of discontent for considering the phenomenon “in substantial isolation from politics. They have put the onus of alienation on the individual and portrayed the alienated as deviants whose abnormality needed explanation. In their accounting of the 1980s upswing in levels of trust, Jack Citrin and Donald Philip Green explained how “[i]mportant changes in the American political system have accentuated the prominence of the presidency.”
