TWO decades ago political analysts worried about the fragility of democracy. Governments were struggling withnew
issue demands, and political institutions were having difficulty adjusting to calls for a more participatory democracy. As
discussed in the Introduction to the book several scholars described this situation as a ‘crisis’ of Western democracy
(Crozier et al. 1975; Huntington 1981).
The end of the Cold War has given rise to a new euphoria about democracy and the democratic process, including by
some who had earlier trumpeted the warning calls (Huntington 1991; Fukuyama 1992). And yet, as democracy
celebrates its triumph over communism, there are continuing signs of public doubts about the vitality of the
democratic process. Joseph Nye and his colleagues (1997) demonstrate that low levels of political trust among the
American public have continued into the 1990s. The large protest vote for Perot in 1992 and the term-limits
movement signal Americans' continuing political doubts. Several cross-national analyses suggest this is not a distinctly
American phenomenon (Dalton 1996). This chapter builds on Hans-Dieter Klingemann's global analysis (Chapter 2 of
this volume) by focusing on political support in advanced industrial societies. Our goal is to determine how citizens in
these nations judge the democratic process today. Is there a popular crisis of democracy? We face two challenges in
answering this question. First, there is the conceptual problem about what is meant by ‘political support’ or ‘support
for democracy’. Second, there is the empirical problem of assembling the appropriate cross-national and crosstemporal
data to evaluate claims about changes in public opinion. This chapter addresses both of these topics to
provide a framework for assessing public support for democratic politics in advanced industrial societies.