The Signs of Deconsolidation

Americans have long been growing dissatisfied with the state of their political system. As survey researchers have chronicled over recent decades, an overwhelming majority of citizens now believes that the US is "headed in the wrong direction." Trust in such major institutions as Congress and the presidency has fallen markedly. Engagement in formal political institutions has ebbed. The media are more mistrusted than ever. Even so, most scholars have given these findings a stubbornly optimistic spin: US citizens, they claim, have simply come to have higher expectations of their government. Americans' dissatisfaction with the democratic system is part of a much larger global pattern. It is not just that the proportion of Americans who state that it is "essential" to live in a democracy, which stands at 72% among those born before World War II, has fallen to 30% among millennials. The phenomenon of democratic deconsolidation is conceptually distinct from assessments of the extent to which a country is governed democratically at a particular moment in time.