When Gordon Brown, in one of his first acts as prime minister, issued his green paper “The Governance of Britain,” he was in part responding to the view, commonplace in the political class, that there is a “crisis of disengagement” from politics.

What is less commonly acknowledged is that this disengagement is close to being a general phenomenon across “mature” and even not so mature democracies. While British commentators sounded the alarm when voter turnout dipped below 60 per cent in the 2001 general election, few noticed that this was part of a wider trend. Historic postwar lows in electoral turnout were also recorded in the Netherlands in 1998, in Austria and Portugal in 1999, in Spain in 2000, in Italy in 2001, in Ireland in 2002 and in Germany in 2005. British political parties have been haemorrhaging members at the rate of about one every 12 minutes since 1980. But party membership among the democracies of western Europe almost halved between 1980 and 2000. The British public’s trust in government has almost halved since the mid-1970s. But the decline has been more rapid in Italy, and many more Swedes, Finns, Austrians and Germans now think their politicians lose touch with voters as soon as they are elected than was the case 30 years ago.

The ubiquity of the trend across markedly different societies and political systems underlines the main objection to the conventional wisdom about democratic disengagement—that it is the fault of governments and politicians. Some accounts focus on particular scandals (cash for peerages and so on) or crises that have damaged public confidence. Others stress the declining performance of governments. On this view, citizens have lost trust in government simply because government is doing less to earn it. In the US, the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, with its relentless focus on the idea that Washington isn’t working, is built squarely on this theme. Obama taps into a public belief that politics used to be a nobler, more ambitious enterprise than it is today. “It’s not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most,” he has said often on the stump. “It’s the smallness of our politics.”

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