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Political Parties and Confidence in Government: A Comparison of Norway, Sweden and the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Arthur H. Miller  and
Ola Listhaug
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Extract

Comparable survey data from Norway, Sweden and the United States are used to examine trends in political trust for the period 1964–86. During the early part of that period trust declined in all three countries; later it recovered for Norway but continued to plummet in Sweden and the United States. Three major features of the party system are hypothesized to explain the difference in these trends for the three countries. These features are: the structural aspects of the party system; the public's cognitive judgements of the parties as representatives of the policy interests; and the possibility that a negative rejection of political parties as undesirable institutions may spill over to citizen evaluations of government more generally.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , July 1990 , pp. 357 - 386
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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