It has been said about the United States that it is now suffering ‘a crisis of regime’. Europe, we have been told, is in little better condition: ‘all over Europe the First World War broke up the structure of society which, before 1914, had provided the necessary basis of confidence between government and governed. There no longer exists, except in a few places such as Switzerland, that general acceptance of the conduct of national affairs that adds to the vigor of government and society alike.’1 These are the kinds of practical political problems to which the concept of political support, as found in systems analysis, has been directed.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0007123400008309

A Re-assessment of the Concept of Political Support

A transformation of basic political priorities may be taking place in Western Europe. I hypothesize: (1) that people have a variety of needs which are given high or low priority according to their degree of fulfillment: people act on behalf of their most important unsatisfied need, giving relatively little attention to needs already satisfied—except that (2) people tend to retain the value priorities adopted in their formative years throughout adult life. In contemporary Western Europe, needs for physical safety and economic security are relatively well satisfied for an unprecedentedly large share of the population. Younger, more affluent groups have been formed entirely under these conditions, and seem relatively likely to give top priority to fulfillment of needs which remain secondary to the older and less affluent majority of the population. Needs for belonging and intellectual and esthetic self-fulfillment (characterized as “post-bourgeois” values) may take top priorities among the former group. Survey data from six countries indicate that the value priorities of the more affluent postwar group do contrast with those of groups raised under conditions of lesser economic and physical security. National patterns of value priorities correspond to the given nation's economic history, moreover, suggesting that the age-group differences reflect the persistence of preadult experiences, rather than life cycle effects. The distinctive value priorities imply distinctive political behavior—being empirically linked with preferences for specific political issues and political parties in a predictable fashion. If the respective age cohorts retain their present value priorities, we would expect long-term shifts in the political goals and patterns of political partisanship prevailing in these societies.

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The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies

Many fear that democracies are suffering from a legitimacy crisis. This book focuses on 'democratic deficits', reflecting how far the perceived democratic performance of any state diverges from public expectations. Pippa Norris examines the symptoms by comparing system support in more than fifty societies worldwide, challenging the pervasive claim that most established democracies have experienced a steadily rising tide of political disaffection during the third-wave era. The book diagnoses the reasons behind the democratic deficit, including demand (rising public aspirations for democracy), information (negative news about government) and supply (the performance and structure of democratic regimes). Finally, Norris examines the consequences for active citizenship, for governance and, ultimately, for democratization. This book provides fresh insights into major issues at the heart of comparative politics, public opinion, political culture, political behavior, democratic governance, political psychology, political communications, public policymaking, comparative sociology, cross-national survey analysis and the dynamics of the democratization process.

Democratic Deficit: Critical Citizens Revisited

Legal authorities gain when they receive deference and cooperation from the public. Considerable evidence suggests that the key factor shaping public behavior is the fairness of the processes legal authorities use when dealing with members of the public. This reaction occurs both during personal experiences with legal authorities and when community residents are making general evaluations of the law and of legal authorities. The strength and breadth of this influence suggests the value of an approach to regulation based upon sensitivity to public concerns about fairness in the exercise of legal authority. Such an approach leads to a number of suggestions about valuable police practices, as well as helping explain why improvements in the objective performance of the police and courts have not led to higher levels of public trust and confidence in those institutions.

Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and the Effective Rule of Law

/pdf/citizenship-and-education-in-twenty-eight-countries-civic-3ecup9ixdo.pdf

Citizenship and Education in Twenty-Eight Countries: Civic Knowledge and Engagement at Age Fourteen.

Children in the Political System: Origins of Political Legitimacy

In its broadest conception, a political system is a means through which the wants of the members of a society are converted into binding decisions. To sustain a conversion process of this sort a society must provide a relatively stable context for political interaction, a set of ground rules for participating in all parts of the political process. We may describe this context variously as a constitutional order, a set of fundamental rules, or customary procedures for settling differences. But however this context is defined, it usually includes three elements: some minimal constraints on the general goals of its members, rules or norms governing behavior, and structures of authority through which the members of the system act in making and implementing political outputs. To these goals, norms and structures we may give the traditional name “political regime” or constitutional order in the broadest, nonlegal sense of the phrase.We may hypothesize that if a political system is to persist, one of its major tasks is to provide for the input of at least a minimal level of support for a regime of some kind. A political system that proved unable to sustain a regime, that is, some relatively ordered and stable way of converting inputs into outputs, could not avoid collapsing. Each time a dispute arose it would have to seek to agree on means for settling differences at the same time as it sought to bring about a settlement of the substance of the issue, a virtually impossible combination of tasks for a society to engage in continuously.

The Child'S Acquisition of Regime Norms: Political Efficacy

To maintain a social construct as varied, exten sive, and demanding of social resources as government, a broad panoply of forces need to be set in motion to provide the requisite support. The political socialization of new members is one of the most far-reaching and most consequential of these forces. The political system must somehow provide a flow of information about and continuously create deep feelings of loyalty and obedience for its basic forms. One of these is its government or authorities. Government is a primary focus for the generation of politically supportive or disaffective orienta tions. The data here presented suggest that in the United States a supportive image of government is being widely and regularly reproduced for young new members. The average grade school child of the test group appears to experience some rather basic changes in his conception of government— changes which move him toward a cognitive image that con forms to the requirements of a democratic political system. We know ...

The Child's Image of Government

The institution of elections is a significant feature of most present day political systems and is one of the most widely used of all of the political inventions of mankind. Rose and Mossawir have recently remarked that, “Elections are among the most ubiquitous of contemporary political institutions, and voting is the single act of political participation undertaken by a majority of adults in a majority of the nations in the world today.” The importance of elections is especially high in democratic systems. Both earlier and more contemporary discussions of the concept of democracy have employed elections as a primary definiendum and requisite feature of democracy. Indeed, if any single institution serves as popular democracy's sine qua non, it is that of elections. The general argument that elections are “those most essential events in the democratic process” is often posed from the perspective of the importance of the functions they perform in the political system. The most widely remarked of these functions is to provide a mechanism by which the great mass of members of the system are able to choose their leaders—thus giving majority approval to the exercise of leadership. This is important both from the standpoint of solving the problem of legitimate leadership succession and as a means of potential relief from abuses or inadequacies of a present set of rulers. Secondly, elections may serve as an indication of public choice among government policies—although this function is probably less frequently performed than once was thought to be the case. In referenda, the function is direct; but even in
 the elections of candidates for public office there is on occasion a question of public decision among the broader aspects of policy programs. Furthermore, belief by future candidates in the possibility that voters may reject them at the next election because of their policies may lead them to anticipate public feeling, thus allowing indirect influence of elections upon policy formation. The latter may operate even in the absence of more direct control by the electorate. A third central function of elections is legitimation of a regime. An election serves as a device of public endorsement—or occasionally, of repudiation—of the system of government.

Support for the Institution of Elections by the Mass Public

Resaerch on preadult political socialization conducted prior to the women's movement and the rise of feminist consciousness indicated that girls lagged behind boys in many aspects of their political development. Studies in the 1970s showed that this gap was closing. We examine preadult political orientations in the 1980s, and discover that the optimism of prior research is perhaps premature. Significant gender-related differenes exist for girls and boys, as well as for their parents, on a variety of measures of "politicization." Evidence suggests that these distinctions are passed on through the socialization process in the family at least to some degree. Structural and cultural factors may further contribute to the persistence of gender-based distinctions in politicization.

Jack Dennis

Papers

Children in the Political System: Origins of Political Legitimacy

The Child'S Acquisition of Regime Norms: Political Efficacy

The Child's Image of Government

Support for the Institution of Elections by the Mass Public

Gender Differences in the Politicization of American Children