Overview

The erosion of democratic trust is no longer a phenomenon confined to Europe but has become a shared challenge across advanced democracies, including the United States. The evidence collected throughout this book shows that the decline in confidence toward governments, parliaments, media systems and political parties reflects not a temporary fluctuation but a structural transformation in how citizens form, interpret and revise expectations of political authority. Across Europe and the United States, citizens accustomed to long periods of state competence and institutional reliability now interpret political outcomes through more individualised, polarised and affectively charged lenses, creating a volatile environment in which expectations escalate faster than institutions can respond. The conditions that once anchored political judgment-stable party loyalties, broadly trusted media institutions, predictable economic patterns and clear hierarchies of expertise-are now far less cohesive. As a result, the standards against which performance is measured shift more quickly than the institutions responsible for delivering that performance can adapt. This book argues that these developments are best understood through the lens of the process-based theory of (un)justified expectations introduced in earlier chapters. Expectations become unjustified when they rest on misinterpretations of institutional capacity, communicative distortions or historically inherited assumptions that no longer reflect contemporary realities. In both Europe and the United States, successive generations internalised narratives in which democratic governance was associated with expanding welfare provision, technological mastery and steady economic growth. Even as structural conditions changed-through deindustrialisation, globalisation, regulatory interdependence and the digital transformation of public communication-these cognitive baselines persisted. Citizens continued to assume that governments could intervene decisively in markets, protect collective welfare and maintain national coherence. When institutions proved less capable of doing so, disappointment accumulated not simply because performance deteriorated, but because expectations had ceased to align with what governments could realistically achieve.

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