theguardian.com wrote:... The broad consensus is that everyone is sick of politicians. On the one hand, eminences grises such as Gus O’Donnell (chosen randomly as the most recent example) connect living standards to the disenchantment. The more stagnant people’s wages, the worse their conditions, the higher their rents, the more disillusioned with mainstream politics they’re likely to be. The counter-argument is that MPs are simply bad people: witness the expenses scandal, or Iain Duncan Smith. Far from giving a clear map of the terrain, these perspectives are just features of it: bogs and pitfalls.
The real crisis of faith is not in politicians but in democracy, and this is common across the OECD countries. The World Economic Forum details its extent: from Sweden to New Zealand, Britain to the US, the percentage of people who say that it is “essential” to live in a democracy has dropped from around 70% among those born in the 1930s, to around 25% for those born in the 1980s.
Part of this is sheer amnesia. People born in the 1930s remember what the alternatives to democracy look like; it is ardently to be hoped that the young can be reminded by argument, and don’t have to see first-hand the devastation of authoritarianism before they believe it. The young are disillusioned, according to the Global Shapers survey, by bureaucracy, insincerity, lack of action and accountability, and a sense that the government doesn’t understand them.
That last point dovetails with the perception of insincerity. There is a problem with selection, a sense that politics is a career for insiders, people heavily invested in the status quo, who see their job as protecting it from the demands of the people. In 2012 a team of Italian physicists, economists and political scientists modelled a parliament in which some members had been chosen at random, like juries, and found the resultant system to be both more efficient and better at pursuing broad social welfare – as well as more diverse and thus more representative...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... a-politics
According to Winston Churchill the best argument against democracy was to be found in a five-minute conversation with the average voter, but then again he also said that it was the least worse system available. If we think democracy is good, both in principle and practice, then perhaps we need to contribute something a little more substantial than just our votes? If we are happy to leave the maintenance, development, reform, and/or running of democracy to other people is our non-participation just allowing the system to be run in the interests of those who do bother to participate?www.nytimes.com wrote:... Across numerous countries, including Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States, the percentage of people who say it is “essential” to live in a democracy has plummeted, and it is especially low among younger generations.
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Support for autocratic alternatives is rising, too. Drawing on data from the European and World Values Surveys, the researchers found that the share of Americans who say that army rule would be a “good” or “very good” thing had risen to 1 in 6 in 2014, compared with 1 in 16 in 1995.
That trend is particularly strong among young people. For instance, in a previously published paper, the researchers calculated that 43 percent of older Americans believed it was illegitimate for the military to take over if the government were incompetent or failing to do its job, but only 19 percent of millennials agreed. The same generational divide showed up in Europe, where 53 percent of older people thought a military takeover would be illegitimate, while only 36 percent of millennials agreed...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world ... .html?_r=2
