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Summary

Liberal democracy is in crisis where it was long thought most securely established. In both Western Europe and the United States, polls suggest voters are losing faith in democratic institutions; polarization and illiberalism appear to be on the rise. A striking feature of this crisis moment is the perception that many of the most pressing political issues are shared conditions of the United States and Europe—a significant change from earlier decades. This perceived convergence raises critical questions: To what extent are current democratic weaknesses in Europe in fact similar to or different from those facing the United States? And what are the most fertile areas for mutual learning and cooperation? 

Shared Challenges

• Following recent governance crises, popular confidence in political institutions has plummeted to historically low levels on both sides of the Atlantic—particularly among the less educated and less well-off.
• Many U.S. and European voters are disenchanted with mainstream political parties, which they see as ineffective and out of touch. This groundswell of antiestablishment sentiment has benefited more extremist outsider movements and candidates, triggering greater political polarization and fragmentation.
• Citizens are finding it harder to determine which news sources are trustworthy and which are not. Deliberate efforts to spread disinformation create new challenges for democratic discourse.
• Government responses to terrorist threats have triggered new concerns over creeping extensions of executive power. Finding the right balance between security and individual liberty has become increasingly complex, partly due to unsettled questions about citizens’ right to privacy.

U.S.-Specific Challenges

• High levels of partisan polarization in the United States—heightened by its winner-take-all electoral system—have eroded democratic norms and produced gridlock, thereby undermining democratic performance.
• Skyrocketing socioeconomic inequalityand weak institutional safeguards allow wealthy U.S. elites to exert disproportionate political influence. Partisan polarization thus coexists with heightened vertical polarization between a small group at the top and the rest of society.
• A deeply contested electoral process that is characterized by atypical levels of decentralization and partisanship exacerbates these dynamics in the United States: issues like voting restrictions pose much larger hurdles to representation than in most European democracies.

Europe-Specific Challenges

• European electoral systems provide more room for extremist and antipluralist political forces to gain political representation. In Hungary and Poland, democratically elected governments have already taken major steps to weaken independent civil society and the rule of law.
• A European democracy deficitpersists:as decisionmaking has moved from the national to the European level, efforts to boost citizen participation have not kept pace. The disconnect between Brussels and many European voters has fueled Euroskepticism, which in turn thwarts efforts at institutional reform.

Introduction

Liberal democracy is in crisis in places where it was long thought most securely established. In both Western Europe and the United States, polls suggest voters are losing faith in democratic institutions; polarization and illiberalism appear to be on the rise. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, the average quality of democracy has declined on both sides of the Atlantic since 2006.¹

A striking feature of this crisis moment is the perception that many of the most pressing political issues—such as the rise of antipluralist populism, fragmentation in existing political spaces and debates, and fears of malign external actors interfering in domestic politics—are shared conditions of the United States and Europe.² This sense of being in the same boat politically represents a significant change from earlier decades, when most American observers viewed European political dynamics as fundamentally different from U.S. politics, and European counterparts saw U.S. democracy as defined by uniquely American political syndromes.

Indeed, some crucial challenges are clearly shared now. In Europe as well as in the United States, popular trust in political institutions has declined in recent years. Many voters are disenchanted with mainstream political parties, which they see as ineffective and out of touch. This groundswell of antiestablishment sentiment has benefited outsider movements and candidates. U.S. and European democracies are also grappling with a more fragmented public information space and foreign efforts to sow disinformation and mistrust—as well as threats to civil liberties emanating from expanding executives and illiberal government action. These trends, while not entirely new, have been brought to a head by economic crisis, hardening contestation over migration and diversity, and changing geopolitical currents.

Despite areas of convergence, the United States still struggles with problems of political representation that are less pressing in Europe.

Yet despite these areas of transatlantic convergence, the United States still struggles with problems of political representation that are less pressing in Europe. Exceptionally high levels of partisan polarization—heightened by specific features of the U.S. political system—have eroded democratic norms and produced gridlock, exacerbating popular discontent. In addition, while socioeconomic divides have intensified across many Western democracies, the trend is most pronounced in the United States, where weak institutional safeguards enable wealthy elites to exert disproportionate political influence. Partisan polarization thus coexists with heightened vertical polarization between a small group at the top and the rest of society, feeding into and being fed by other democratic weaknesses. The U.S. electoral process—characterized by atypical levels of decentralization and partisanship—exacerbates these dynamics, with issues like partisan gerrymandering and voting restrictions posing much larger hurdles.

At the same time, European democracies face challenges that are not present in the United States, or exist to a much lesser degree. European multiparty parliamentary systems provide more room for extremist and antipluralist political forces to gain political representation. In several Central European countries with short democratic histories and weak democratic institutions, democratically elected illiberal governments have already taken major steps to undermine independent civil society and the rule of law. Other European governments have to grapple with extremist forces increasing their share of parliamentary seats, thereby deepening political cleavages and often complicating coalition formation. In addition, European democracies continue to struggle with the consequences of supranational integration: as decisionmaking has moved from the national to the European level, efforts to boost citizen participation have not kept pace. The disconnect between Brussels and many European voters has fueled Euroskepticism—which in turn thwarts efforts at European reform.

As decisionmaking has moved from the national to the European level, efforts to boost citizen participation have not kept pace.

In both the United States and Europe, broader geopolitical changes add to internal democratic weaknesses. Authoritarian powers like Russia and China are exerting rising political influence across borders, using tools that range from think tank engagement and new global media platforms to concerted disinformation campaigns.³ These efforts not only challenge Western democracies’ global geopolitical dominance, but also seek to discredit the viability of the liberal democratic model itself—for example, by manipulating existing divisions within democratic societies. In addition, transnational policy challenges related to migration and globalization are placing democratic institutions under heightened stress, testing their legitimacy and effectiveness. This wider context makes domestic democratic reforms more difficult, but also more pressing.

The long-standing perception of basic political difference between the United States and Europe has led to a relative scarcity of well-established structures for U.S.-European learning and cooperation on democratic deepening and reform. Yet as political actors and analysts on both sides of the Atlantic are looking for answers to the democratic crisis, the sense of a shared malaise could open the door to more productive lesson-sharing and partnerships.

Shared Challenges

Rising Distrust in Democratic Institutions

Political scientists like Russell J. Dalton and Pippa Norris already in the 1990s had observed decreasing levels of trust in political institutions across many established democracies.⁴ This long-standing trend exploded into the public consciousness with the unexpected electoral successes of populist outsiders in 2016 and 2017, which highlighted widespread public disenchantment with the political status quo. Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk even warned that the West was witnessing early signs of “democratic deconsolidation,” arguing that younger people in established democracies appear not only more distrustful of political leaders but also less supportive of democracy as a political system than previous generations.⁵ The fear is that Western democracies may slowly be rotting from the inside, with citizens no longer committed to defending core democratic values and institutions.

The past few years have indeed been characterized by low levels of trust in political institutions and leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the percentage of Americans who expressed a “great deal” or a “fair amount of trust” in political leaders declined from 63 percent in 2004 to 42 percent in 2016, a new low in more than four decades.⁶ In 2017, only 12 percent of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in Congress, down from an already relatively low 30 percent in 2004.⁷ An index measuring “system support”—the degree to which Americans view their political system as fundamentally legitimate—shows a decline by 18 points between 2006 and 2014.⁸

In Europe, confidence in political institutions dropped sharply after the onset of the euro crisis. According to Eurobarometer, trust in national parliaments across the European Union fell from 38 percent in 2004 to 28 percent in 2016, while trust in national governments declined from 34 percent to 27 percent.⁹ However, these averages conceal significant variation between and within countries: the decline in trust was much starker among poorer Europeans and residents of Southern Europe.¹⁰ A 2017 Pew Global Attitudes Survey showed alarmingly low levels of satisfaction with the functioning of democracy in France, Greece, Italy, and Spain (see figure 1). It also revealed a large gap in satisfaction with democracy between those Europeans who think the economy is doing well and those who do not—a difference of more than 40 percentage points in France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden.¹¹

How do these patterns fit into longer-term trends? Survey data collected since the 1970s suggest a general decline in institutional trust among Americans and many Europeans over the past several decades.¹² These patterns have been linked to processes of social modernization: citizens now have access to more information and may have less deference to authority and higher expectations of public institutions.¹³ But the trends are not linear. In the United States, trust in government has fluctuated over the course of the past decades, with an increase in public confidence in the early 1980s and a renewed drop since former president George W. Bush’s second term.¹⁴ Some institutions—like the military—have been less affected (see figure 2).¹⁵ In Europe, longer-term trends have varied from country to country. For example, while the UK and Poland witnessed a rising tide of public mistrust in government institutions during the 2000s, Belgium and Finland experienced the reverse.¹⁶

In an overall context of declining trust, citizens view some democratic institutions—political parties, national legislatures, and governments—in a particularly negative light. A key driver seems to be the perception that these institutions are failing to do their jobs. For example, heightened polarization and legislative gridlock in the United States has fueled rising disenchantment with Congress.¹⁷ In Europe, skyrocketing unemployment following the financial crisis undermined trust in both national and European political institutions, particularly among those countries and voters most directly affected by socioeconomic upheaval.¹⁸

Decreasing levels of trust in political institutions do not necessarily indicate that voters in Western democracies are turning away from democratic values en masse. While there is some evidence that younger voters may be more open to nondemocratic forms of governance than older generations, the significance of these findings remains contested: several scholars have noted that this trend may constitute an age, rather than a cohort, effect that it is largely confined to certain Western democracies, and that confidence in specific institutions actually appears to be lower among older voters.¹⁹ Across Europe and the United States, support for representative democracy remains comparatively high.²⁰

Yet many citizens are clearly frustrated with democratic performance. In countries like France, Italy, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the United States, a sizable share of the population expresses support for the idea of rule by experts or, to a lesser degree, rule by a strong leader or the military. This trend is particularly striking in Hungary, a country that has experienced significant backsliding over the past several years: 68 percent support rule by experts as a good way to govern the country.²¹ In the United States, recent Gallup data indicates only around one-third say they are satisfied with the way they are being governed.²² These numbers are concerning: modern democracies tend to backslide through executive aggrandizement—elected leaders gradually weakening institutional constraints on their power. An electorate frustrated with ineffective and unrepresentative governance may be more likely to welcome this type of overreach, or vote for candidates that mobilize against institutional constraints with the promise of renewal.

Disconnect Between Mainstream Political Parties and Citizens

One institution has borne the brunt of popular discontent: mainstream political parties are struggling to engage ordinary citizens. In Europe, the result has been a rise in support for far-right (and, in some countries, far-left) parties and populist movements. In the United States, it is expressed in growing voter discontent with both major parties. In both places, new civic and protest movements have emerged that circumvent traditional forms of party engagement.

Political parties are consistently ranked the most disliked political institution in most Western democracies.²³ This is not a new phenomenon: in Europe, popular confidence in political elites as well as party activism and membership began declining in the 1980s.²⁴ The euro crisis and tensions over austerity and migration have exacerbated these trends. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, centrist European parties that had embraced globalization, immigration, and various degrees of neoliberalism struggled to provide clear policy solutions. Trust in political parties declined precipitously, particularly in some parts of Western and Southern Europe. In France, Greece, Italy, and Spain, fewer than ten percent of people expressed trust in their country’s political parties in 2014 (see figure 3). Large numbers began turning their back to establishment parties: between 2004 and 2015, European challenger parties increased their vote share from around 10 to 23 percent (see figure 4).²⁵ Whereas many voters in Southern Europe gravitated further left, centrist parties in Northern and Central Europe have faced stronger challengers from the far-right—particularly as immigration and terrorism have risen on the European agenda.

A greater diversity of parties and political voices can, of course, be seen positively, leading to better representation. In Spain, for example, the formation of the left-wing Podemos—which emerged from anticorruption and antiausterity protests—brought new wind into the Spanish political arena. Yet the weakening of centrist parties also poses real challenges. First, while not all populist challengers are necessarily antidemocratic, antiestablishment sentiments have benefited far-right parties with deeply illiberal and xenophobic strands.²⁶ France is a case in point: the Front National’s vote share nearly doubled from 17.8 percent in 2002 to 33.9 percent in 2017.²⁷ In Germany that same year, a far-right party won the third-largest share of seats and entered parliament for the first time since the Second World War.²⁸ Where such parties prevail, minorities often see threats to their safety and livelihoods. In Hungary and Poland, the election of nationalist parties that ran on antiestablishment platforms has led to attacks on the separation of powers as well as on independent civil society and media.

Between 2004 and 2015, European challenger parties increased their vote share from around 10 to 23 percent.

Second, greater political fragmentation makes it more difficult for political parties to form stable governing coalitions and pass difficult policy reforms.²⁹ In several countries, the emergence of new parties has gone hand-in-hand with political deadlock, unstable minority governments, and more dysfunctional governance. In Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands, greater political fragmentation has led to years of grand coalitions between left- and right-wing parties that have fueled voter discontent with undifferentiated centrism.³⁰ It remains to be seen whether these trends represent the beginning of a new normal in European electoral politics. Much will depend on whether mainstream parties successfully reinvigorate their political platforms—and the extent to which challenger parties can retain their outsider appeal.

In the United States, the majoritarian electoral system creates a fundamentally different party landscape, with limited opportunities for new party formation. Yet voter identification and satisfaction with political parties has also declined. Ahead of the 2016 election, six in ten Americans said that neither major party represented their views—a thirteen percent increase since 1990 (see figure 5).³¹ A July 2017 Gallup poll showed 45 percent of Americans identifying as independent, indicating a dislike for both parties.³² At the same time, most Americans now live in uncompetitive congressional districts, meaning that they have little meaningful choice to begin with.³³

In 2016, both the Democratic Party and Republican Party establishments were rattled by outsider challengers. The progressive base of the Democrats is increasingly pushing back against a centrist party leadership that is viewed as out of touch with popular grievances, lacking moral and political integrity, and too cautious in its reform proposals. On the Republican side, support for President Donald Trump’s antiestablishment, nativist, and protectionist message suggests that many voters have felt unrepresented by the party’s pro-trade, pro-immigration, and status-quo-oriented policies. In fact, recent social science research shows that self-identified U.S. conservatives often take relatively liberal positions on key issues like the size of the government—which made them susceptible to a more heterodox candidate like Trump.³⁴

Social scientists have advanced structural explanations to explain long-term trends of voter disengagement from political parties. As social classes have become more disaggregated and economies have transformed, parties’ natural constituencies—such as churches and unions—have fractured.³⁵ Mainstream parties have struggled to formulate political platforms that speak to both the winners and losers of the status quo—and are often viewed as neglecting the latter in favor of the former.³⁶ At the same time, they have become more technocratic and professionalized, focused on governance rather than direct representation.³⁷ Many parties have not transformed their internal organizational cultures to appeal to younger voters or other underrepresented groups. In Europe for example, polling data suggests that most young people do not want to join political parties and generally hold them in low regard.³⁸

Disengagement from parties has not necessarily gone hand-in-hand with political apathy. New social movements and citizen initiatives have emerged that push for representation and responsiveness outside of party channels.³⁹ Yet at the same time, a growing gap between parties and voters suggests that large parts of the electorate view the existing parties and party activism as poor mechanisms to shape democracy and advance their interests.

Problematic Public Information Space

On both sides of the Atlantic, governments and citizens are struggling to adjust to increasingly fragmented public information spaces and deliberate efforts to spread disinformation and stir mistrust. The speed, scale, and reach of digital information flows have fundamentally reshaped the ways information is disseminated and consumed. As little as five years ago, this trend was still celebrated by many as fundamentally democratizing. Yet the sheer amount of information now available also means that readers carry much greater responsibility to assess the quality of news content. The role played by social media networks and increasing efforts by foreign governments to manipulate these platforms pose decidedly new threats to fact-based political discourse.

Several trends are worth highlighting. First, many Western democracies are characterized by relatively low levels of trust in traditional media outlets. A 2017 Eurobarometer survey found that only 34 percent of respondents across Europe claimed to trust the media (see figure 6), with particularly low levels of trust in France, the UK, and Greece (see figure 7). Those who placed themselves in the lower-middle or working class and were worse off economically were particularly likely to express distrust.⁴⁰ Throughout Europe, news consumers tend to have greater trust in radio and TV than in social networks and the written press.⁴¹

In the United States, trust in the mass media has decreased from 53 percent in 1997 to 32 percent in 2016, according to polling data.⁴² Distrust in the media appears to be fueled by—or at least correlated with—heightened partisanship. A new study by Gallup and the Knight Foundation, for example, found that Republicans are considerably more likely to have unfavorable views of mainstream news organizations (see figure 8), a trend mirrored in Trump’s repeated attacks on prominent news outlets. And while 60 percent of Republicans view Fox News as an objective media outlet, only 3 percent of Democrats agree.⁴³ Comparative analyses show that the American media environment is indeed much more ideologically polarized than that of other Western democracies—perhaps partly due to the absence of a centrist public broadcasting organization that captures both left- and right-wing voters.⁴⁴

Second, increasing numbers of citizens in the United States and Europe obtain at least some of their news from social media, even though traditional broadcasters and newspapers still play a dominant role.⁴⁵ This shift poses new challenges for democratic discourse. Research suggests that online news consumption makes it easier to seek out information that conforms to one’s beliefs and ignore dissenting information.⁴⁶ Conspiracy theories appear to be more virulent, numerous, and persistent when circulated online rather than offline.⁴⁷ In addition, political discourse online is often shaped by those who use anonymity to engage in targeted harassment and inflammatory dialogue.⁴⁸ The effect of these phenomena on people’s political views and political participation remains poorly understood.⁴⁹ However, it is clear that populist parties throughout the West use social media platforms very successfully to spread their political message—often tapping into popular distrust of establishment media outlets.⁵⁰

Third, online political discourse has also enabled the deliberate diffusion of false information and rumors for political purposes, as evidenced by the professional online trolls and political ads used by the Russian government to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election as well as a number of European elections.⁵¹ Social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook—and the wealth of data they collect—offer new avenues for domestic and foreign actors to shape public opinion and sow distrust through coordinated disinformation campaigns.⁵² As outlined in a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace paper by Erik Brattberg and Tim Maurer, several European governments have already begun taking measures to curb the risk of Russian information and cyber operations in elections, including new legal measures, awareness-raising campaigns, technical changes to election infrastructure, and operational and policy changes.⁵³ The United States so far has lagged behind in these efforts, though recent revelations about data harvesting by the voter profiling firm Cambridge Analytica have triggered stronger demands for regulation of social media platforms.⁵⁴

All three trends are clearly interrelated. The common thread is that citizens are finding it harder to determine which news sources are trustworthy and accurate and which are not.⁵⁵ For example, while eight in ten U.S. adults believe that the news media are important to democracy, many also say that it has become harder to remain well-informed and that news media are not fulfilling their role.⁵⁶ The implications for democracy are significant: political discourse becomes more polarized and less productive if voters no longer agree on a common set of facts. Low levels of trust in professional media outlets in turn make it harder to disprove false or inflammatory claims. The dissemination of inaccurate or misleading information can distort election campaigns, affect public opinion, and reinforce inter-group prejudices and animosity—all of which risk undermining the quality of democratic debate and representation.

Threats to Civil Liberties

Current threats to democracy emanate not only from changing citizen perceptions and preferences but also from illiberal government actions. In general, both the United States and Western European countries offer strong protections for core civil liberties such as freedom of association, assembly, and expression. This stands in contrast to Eastern and Central Europe, where independent civil society and the media have increasingly come under attack. Yet in all of these regions, government responses to heightened terrorist threats have triggered new concerns over creeping extensions of executive power. Finding the right balance between security and individual liberty has become increasingly complex, partly due to the pervasiveness of digital technology and unsettled questions about citizens’ right to privacy.

In the United States, the passing of the Patriot Act after the September 11 terrorist attacks ushered in a trend of heightened surveillance and weak regulatory oversight and disclosure.⁵⁷ For example, in June 2013, records leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden revealed that the U.S. government had secretly used Section 215 of the P