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Political alienation is an umbrella term that captures a set of negative attitudes about politics that are distributed in systematic ways across the mass public. Higher concentrations of alienated individuals are often located in socially subordinated, marginalized, and politically under-represented groups. Broadly defined as a loss of confidence in political actors and institutions, mass political alienation can lead citizens to challenge regime legitimacy and can compromise regime stability over the long term. This entry provides an overview of ongoing debates about how to define political alienation, what causes it, how it influences individual and mass political participation, the consequences for governance, and prescriptive measures to restore citizens’ confidence in elected officials. Although levels of political alienation have varied historically and across different types of government, this entry focuses on advanced industrialized democracies in the post–World War II era.

Though political alienation has a long intellectual history and is particularly indebted to Marx, contemporary research interest in political alienation deepened with the second wave of democratization following World War II (1939–1945) as political scientists tried to forecast potential for long-term regime stability. The debate continued to flourish in the 1960s and 1970s as political scientists and political elites sought to understand the causes—and predict the long-term consequences—of the mass movements for social justice unfolding in Western democracies. Attributed to “culture shift,” characterized by an increase in elite-challenging attitudes about government and more activist modes of political participation, these social justice movements became institutionalized in new policies and government agencies. Nevertheless, public confidence in government and voter turnout continued to decline with each ensuing decade.

Defining And Measuring Political Alienation And Support

Ada Finifter’s work is a common starting point for political scientists interested in political alienation. Finifter (1970) defined four separate attitudinal dimensions of political alienation—powerlessness, meaningless, normlessness, and isolation. Powerless citizens express the belief that political elites are not attentive to voters’ concerns, and that there is little that they can do to influence political outcomes. Politics is meaningless when elite decision making is seen as senseless, unpredictable, and random. Citizens find that politics is normless when political elites break the rules of the game. Normlessness also is referred to as political distrust or cynicism. Isolated individuals reject the norms and values of the dominant political culture.

National and cross-national surveys of mass political attitudes and behavior conducted over four decades commonly include items designed to measure each of these four dimensions. In their 2000 volume on disaffection in political life cross-nationally, Putnam, Pharr, and Dalton used The Harris Poll measures of individual respondents’ disagreement or agreement with the following statements to establish a common framework that links how this concept is measured in North America to analogous efforts in the European and Japanese contexts: “The people running the country don’t really care what happens to you”; “Most people with power try to take advantage of people like yourself ”;“You’re left out of things going on around you”; “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer”; “What you think doesn’t count very much anymore” (9).

These basic survey questions have been used to probe how much citizens’ perceptions of elites are an artifact of the institutions and specific political contexts that determine their range of action. Finifter’s (1970) definition of political alienation captures both specific and diffuse (regime) support. Specific support refers to attitudes about particular politicians and parties; diffuse support captures attitudes about the political regime and political processes. Scholars debate how closely the two different types of support are related. Though correlated, specific and diffuse support can vary independently of one another; voters can distrust elected officials and still support democracy. David Easton (1965) has argued that lack of specific support, left unaddressed for a long period, could translate into a lack of regime support.

Governments that enjoy high levels of legitimacy and regime support enjoy greater ease in making and enforcing unpopular decisions in the short term that will be of long-term benefit to the common good. High levels of diffuse support accumulate over time to constitute a “reserve of goodwill” that is slow to exhaust and sustains regimes through times of political and economic crisis. Similarly, political losers who are confident in the knowledge that there will be political change in the long run and can find alternative outlets for exercising political voice are more likely to remain engaged with politics.

Declining Political Support Across Advanced Industrial Democracies

Americans entered the twenty-first century with less confidence in all branches of government and political institutions (e.g., parties and elections) than in the late 1960s. Similar trends are evident cross-nationally in Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, and Sweden. This long decline in public confidence in politics has been correlated with a decline in voter turnout, a loosening of partisan identification and a corresponding increase in independent voters, and an increase in unconventional forms of political participation when political elites cannot be held accountable through the ballot box. The duration of these trends have led scholars to ask, “Are skeptical publics an enduring feature of democracy?” (Dalton 2006, 254). If so, understanding the roots of discontent may give guidance for improving how democracy works.

The increase in political alienation has been attributed to various reasons: widening disparities between voter preferences and policy outcomes; the inability of the state to maintain a fine balance between policies that protect workers while promoting an environment conducive to economic growth; corruption scandals that reveal collusion between government and business elites at the cost of the well-being of everyday voters; media coverage of political scandals; negative campaigning that focuses on personal attacks; the decline in civic engagement and a corresponding erosion of social capital; and changing public values. All of these factors predict change along one or more dimensions of political alienation to some degree.

Further complicating efforts to understand and respond to deepening public cynicism are the remaining unresolved questions from the 1960s and 1970s about theoretical and empirical links between politically alienated attitudes and the modes of political action that they produce among different social groups in different political contexts. Political alienation can produce a range of behaviors from apathy—or withdrawal from politics— to protest voting and, ultimately, rebellion. Conversely, political alienation also can deepen engagement when angry citizens mobilize for positive democratic change.

Conclusion

Research that attends to the behavioral outcomes of different attitudinal dimensions of political alienation has found that the demobilizing effects of powerless and meaninglessness, can be offset by the mobilizing potential of political cynicism. Russell J. Dalton (2006) finds that contemporary political cynics are also highly supportive of political rights and participatory norms. Similarly, Ronald Ingle hart (1990) finds that when political alienation is characterized by a high level of political cynicism, it is correlated with elite-challenging attitudes that foster an increase in public demands for direct participation in democracy. Despite a decline in public confidence in politics, overwhelming majorities (90 percent) across established democracies agree that democracy is the best form of government. There is considerable evidence that alienated publics in established democracies counterbalance potentially corrosive effects of political distrust with mass actions that reinforce and deepen democratic norms. The politically alienated in democracies can take actions designed to hold officials publicly accountable while demanding greater citizen participation in making the decisions that govern them.

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