Participation and trust on contemporary western societies

Résumé du document

In his article "Ruling the Void?, Peter Mair has investigated the decline of the conventional political patterns, and more precisely the average citizen's demobilization towards the traditional political parties in most of the old settled Western democracies. This trend has been largely studied by political sciences literature, and all the social scientists have come to the same conclusion: there is an undisputable and general decline in the membership of political parties, as well as an increasing electoral turnout Overall there is a decline in level political trusts, all over the Western democracies since the nineties. The there are multiple reasons and consequences of such a decline invoked by Mair. According to him, this decline would be the consequence of a general indifference and disinterest of citizens towards politics and more precisely towards their political leaders. This indifference and disengagement from the traditional political parties is due to several causes.

Extraits

[...] More and more, these forms of participations are taken into account within the political decision making. Of course the traditional political parties haven't yet disappeared and are not likely to disappear in the next decades, but are seen more as suppliers of professional policians than as social actors who represented and structured all the social life. Hence, the fact that the parties are seeing their role and memberships decreasing for a bit more than a decade is not necessarily a sign of a disappearance or end of the democracy. [...]

[...] But, in our point of view, Mair should focus more on social and individual structural changes themselves than seeing in the fail of the parties themselves the consequence of the disengagement of the citizens from the conventional political patterns. Mair focuses way too much on the parties themselves. But in fact, the main cause to the decline of involvement of citizens in parties membership is mainly due to the decline of ideologies (D. Bell, 1960) since the fall of USSR. [...]

[...] The reasons and consequences of such a decline invoked by Mair are multiple. According to him, first of all, this decline would be the consequence of a general indifference and disinterest from citizens towards politics and towards their political leaders more precisely. This indifference and disengagement from the traditional political parties would be due to several causes. He considers that the political parties have failed in two related ways; on the one hand, in their capacity to engage ordinary citizens: and indeed, the citizens are, less and less voting according to a partisan consistency and are more and more reluctant to commit themselves into parties, both in terms of identifications and in terms of membership. [...]

[...] Sociologies. Huntington, S.P The third wave. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Inglehart, R 1977. The silent revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mair, Peter. 2002b. the Aggregate: Mass Electoral Behaviour in Western Europe, 1950-2000.” In Hans Keman Comparative Democratic Politics. [...]

[...] And the end of ideology is not explicitly evoked by Mair. Of course, the increase of professionalization towards political leaders and the closer and closer links that parties maintain with the state and its institution are one of the causes why they are so cut off from the civil society, but it seems that we have to analyse the situation in the opposite sense, that is : this disengagement comes from the citizens themselves, from structural social changes rather than from the fails of the political parties to keep their partisans. [...]