ONE major conclusion of this book is that there are few consistent trends in popular support for the political
community but there is high and perhaps even growing support for democratic values and declining support for
regime institutions and political leaders. An earlier chapter by Hans-Dieter Klingemann has traced these patterns with
respect to democracy world-wide, while Russell Dalton, William Mishler and Richard Rose have confirmed the
existence of these patterns in particular regions of the world. This chapter focuses specifically on the role of public
policy in shaping popular support for democratic institutions among OECD countries. The data are aggregate
indicators across 24 of the 29 member countries of the OECD in 1997, as well as individual-level data from the same
24 countries based on the 1990–1 World Values Survey.52
The role of public policy in shaping electoral outcomes—most particularly withreg ards to government economic
performance—has long been a major preoccupation of political science. Aside from the voter attributes of party
identification or social group membership, economic management has traditionally been viewed as the single most
important factor that can deliver electoral success or failure. By contrast, studies focusing on the role of the economy
in shaping confidence in democratic institutions are comparatively rare (but cf. Clarke, Dutt, and Kornberg, 1993;
Finke, Muller, and Seligson 1987), and almost no attention has been devoted to the impact of the broader policy
outputs of government. Most studies which examine confidence have focused on aggregate over-time trends, usually
concentrating on democracy as a value and tracing changes among particular social, political, and national groups
(Listhaug and Wiberg 1995; Fuchs, Guidorossi, and Svensson 1995; Miller and Listhaug 1990).
Yet if economic performance has a major impact on electoral outcomes, as we know, then it should also have some
influence on popular confidence in democratic
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