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Previous chapters have demonstrated that low and declining citizen respect for government institutions and political leaders is characteristic of contemporary industrialized societies. Evidence since the early 1970s reveals a trend toward growing distrust of government institutions in a number of countries. While this trend is evident, the interpretation of this phenomenon has proved far more controversial. One explanation focuses upon public dissatisfaction with government performance. This chapter explores this question. First, it examines the direct link between government performance, as measured by objective indicators of inflation, unemployment, or government deficits, and institutional confidence in support for government. It then considers the dynamics of political trust and government performance, before moving on to examine the role that expectations play in translating evaluations of government performance into political distrust in three countries where long‐term time‐series data are available—the US, Norway, and Sweden. The study explores how ethical expectations about government standards influence trust in politicians and the conclusion draws some general lessons from the results. The survey data employed in the analysis include the 1990–1 World Values Survey, the Norwegian, Swedish, and US Election Studies, surveys in the US, Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania; data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and OECD are used to measure inflation, unemployment, and government deficits.

Assesses the trajectories and dynamics of public support for seven democratizing regimes in Central and Eastern Europe—Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia—during the first five years following the fall of communism. It begins by offering a reconceptualization of support for new democracies. An examination is then made of popular approval of the new regimes in 1991, shortly following the collapse of communism, and the trajectory of support is tracked through to 1995. Next, a model of the dynamics underlying these trends is developed and tested, paying particular attention to the extent to which support is contingent on political and economic performance. More generally, an exploration is made of whether and to what extent the sources of support change over time as citizens acquire experience with the new regimes.

Feelings of party identification are one of the most important concepts in electoral research; such attachments play a key role in guiding citizen behaviour and structuring party competition. This chapter assembles complete timeseries data from nearly 20 national opinion series to document the general erosion of partisanship. In nearly all nations, both the number of partisan identifiers and the strength of party identification are decreasing—generating a pattern of partisan dealignment in most nations. These declines are concentrated among the young, the better educated and the cognitively mobilized, while political performance seems to have little impact on these trends. We conclude that most contemporary democracies are experiencing a pattern of partisan dealignment that separates the public from the political parties.

Within Turkey’s changing political and cultural social context there has been a shift in the identity of Islamist youth from the collective to the individual via a process of self-reflexivity. These different expressions reflect a visceral transformation faced by Muslim youth. Through looking at textual, audiovisual, and literary and factual accounts, this chapter reflects upon self-narratives, auto-biography and political performance and the modalities of the transformation of well-educated post-Islamist youth. Such an exploration provides a way to understand the problems of this and future generations of youth who will need to adapt and respond constantly to changing cultural dilemmas.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of festivals in late medieval and early modern Spain. Whether meant to impress and lord over neighbors, friends, or foes, or to promote and enhance royal or princely power, celebrations in the late medieval and early modern periods were, as they are today, inextricably linked to the exercise and experience of power. This book focuses on Philip II's 1585–86 journey throughout Spain. Reading accounts of the royal entries, Carnivals, and other festivities that took place during Philip II's perambulations throughout his Iberian realms or on his visits to trans-Pyrenean imperial lands as a prince, one is forcefully struck by the ageless quality of what were essentially political and cultural performances.

This introductory chapter provides a background of the January 25 Revolution, or the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. It also outlines the formal characteristics of liminality and its relevance to politics. The book explores revolution through the concept of liminality, which is understood as a condition characteristic of all transitions between normative social states. Liminality allows for flexible articulation between the political and social, artistic, or cultural spheres and is also attentive to the spatial dimensions of performance. A thread that runs through much of the book is martyrdom, specifically its use in political performances. The chapter then introduces the concept of political Tricksters. In the uncomfortable condition of protracted liminality, Tricksters—beings at home in liminality, common in folklore, mythology, and literature—can become dangerous in politics. The structuring of liminality as precarity enables the rise of Trickster politics on a global scale.

This chapter examines how the history of martyrdom inscribed in and around Tahrir Square constitutes one frame for the political performances that were the idioms of revolution. Martyrs are very common in commemoration, though not necessarily iconic in the sense that they inspire veneration or attract the eye. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss the cumulative weight of commemoration as irrelevant to the political performances that took place in 2011 and its aftermath. The revolutionary political alternative, ideologically diverse, was enacted on a stage composed partly of a much less ambivalent commemorative martyrological history that could always potentially be mobilized against it. And it was mobilized with a vengeance in overthrowing Muhammad Morsy in the summer of 2013. On July 26, ʻAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi openly called for a popular tafwid (mandate) to “fight terrorism,” making an open accession to rule—ratified later by a patently fixed election—inevitable. Tens of thousands of the people thronging Tahrir Square and its surrounding streets on July 26 carried posters of al-Sisi in that demonstration. It should be emphasized that even though al-Sisi was backed by powerful individuals and institutions, and even though his emergence on the political scene indisputably drew all eyes toward him and inspired genuine veneration, his icon-hood was provisional, which is to say that it was inherently unstable.

Translates some of the most decisive and influential discursive and performative moments that shaped the early drama of the unfolding text of Egypt's uprising. By drawing on analytical tools from the fields of translation, performance, and gender studies, as well as social movement theory, the authors translate at both the linguistic and semiotic levels selections from these transformative moments that impacted millions of Egyptians on social and conventional media networks by such diverse actors as activists Asmaa Mahfouz and Wael Ghoneim, former president Hosni Mubarak and General Mohsen al-Fangari. The authors read these discursive interventions as theatrical performances, the impact of which can only be understood through a thick translation that attends not just to the linguistic but to the affective, emotive, and semiotic levels of these transformative discourses.

Political communication is becoming increasingly mediatized. Mediatization refers both to a gradual increase in the role of the media in political communication and the spillover effects that this increase has had on the way politics takes place and is organized and relatedly, the performance of political leadership. Of particular importance for political leadership styles is the surge of drama politics, the fragmentation of political communication and the active role of citizens in political communication. Chapter 9’s typology of democratic political leadership performance lays the ground for an analysis of how paternalist, populist, engaged, and interactive political leadership styles are affected by the increased mediatization. The analysis suggests that an interactive political leadership style is more viable than the other three political leadership styles to patterns of mediatization in the age of governance.

This chapter focuses on scenes of hematological activism. These scenes constitute a historically significant genre of political performance, in relation to the ebbs and flows of other modes of activist signification. Specifically, the chapter suggests that blood donation spectacles act as rituals of verification, in contrast to other modes of political protest such as the fast that are increasingly open to accusations of insincerity and dissembling. Blood extracted on political occasions holds an elusive promise of political transparency: it is promissory matter. Yet as this chapter shows, blood also exposes itself to accusations of dissembling and deception: when used by politicians perceived as corrupt, the communicative medium is drained of its material intimacy with sincerity.

This chapter introduces the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, showing how it fills a gap between theoretical work on the nature and origin of collective social imaginations and empirical work on the politics of science and technology. Emphasizing the role of both practices and performance in constituting imaginaries, the chapter distinguishes sociotechnical imaginaries from other related analytic concepts, such as frames, and addresses problems such as the relationship between individual and collective imaginations, the relative significance of state and non-state actors, the durability of imaginaries, and the potential for resistance to dominant imaginaries.

Chapter five examines how the modern state of Tamil Nadu imagines concepts of a good life in a public political performance. It explores both an acultural concept and a cultural vision of a good life proposed by the State. It shows how the cultural imagination of an alternative modernity repeats the twofold political agenda as it was developed by the Dravidian parties: social reform, justice, equality, the affirmation of everyday life, and secularism. In addition, this imagination of a cultural Tamil modernity is defined by Tamil ethics and identity. The chapter also describes how Tamil modernity is imagined in acultural terms of development, progress, economic and materialistic prosperity. It turns out that Tamil alternative modernity is imagined as depending on two powers, the state apparatus and the power of what has been called the ‘myth’ of the state, which depicts both the state as much as the power of the ‘amman’ (mother) embodied by the female chief minister as essential for well-being, safety, and modernity.

Chapter 4 explores the ramifications of the evolving demographic conditions and fiscal reforms for the careers of local political leaders. The focal issue is the moral hazard embodied in these leaders’ opportunistic use of public enterprises for career advancement and revenue control and manipulation during the 1980s and early 1990s. Their dominant strategy was to promote sales growth without a close link to profitability among the public enterprises under their purview. This strategy helped grow output, revenue, and employment, thereby contributing to the political and economic interests of local officials. Yet it also undermined the financial and organizational health of public enterprises and pushed them down the road to destruction.

This chapter discusses the attitudinal imprint of communism on the second main ideological pillar that differentiated communist regimes form their Western rivals: support for market-based economic principles. In line with the findings about democratic support in the previous chapter, the empirical evidence from the first two decades of post-communism confirms that despite the extinction of Leninist regimes, the effects of the communist socialization project did not simply evaporate overnight. Thus, citizens of ex-communist countries were significantly less supportive of market economics, and these differences persist even when one accounts for a broad range of features related to living in a post-communist country, including pre-communist development differences and post-communist economic and political performance. Moreover, as in the previous chapter, the attitudinal effects of communism cannot be readily attributed to any of its particular policy outcomes—such as different developmental strategies or welfare spending—but rather seems to reflect a different systemic logic.

Chapter 3 describes how Japan remembers the war and the war dead at the annual commemorations on August 15. It shows how political performances and popular media discourses divide rather than unite the nation over the questions of war guilt and national sacrifice. The chapter surveys the political performances on August 15 from 1985 to 2013, as well as the media discourse surrounding them in newspaper editorials, television, and film. It shows that many of Japan’s memory makers responded positively to the international pressures to deepen perpetrator memories and attempted to redress past wrongs in the 1990s, but they faced a severe backlash in the 2000s. Thus the impact of the global politics of regret on Japan has been mixed.

This chapter examines the economic and political performance of three groups of high-income countries—Nordic, European continental, and English-speaking countries—with vastly different systems of social protection. It shows that highly ideological claims made against the social welfare states of Scandinavia are simply off the mark. The “euro-pessimism” in many parts of continental Europe, and the claim that Anglo-Saxon liberalization is crucial to economic well-being, is belied by the persistent high performance of the Nordic economies.

This chapter focuses on Donald Trump’s relationship with the news media during his presidency, arguing that as Trump’s political power increased, his attacks on the press became more extreme. Trump simultaneously amplifies the influence of journalists when he calls them the “enemy of the people” and delegitimizes their authority by classifying “the media” as one of many established elite institutions hostile to the experience of everyday Americans. These attacks turned journalists into an adversary, providing Trump with a scapegoat for his own failings. As president, Trump continued to communicate outside of traditional journalism outlets through social media, political rallies, and conservative media. Trump also targeted journalists of color—particularly women of color—with open hostility. Journalists have responded as victims, even adopting a performative contrariness to support their authority. But they rarely engaged in sustained self-reflexivity or expressed willingness to address deeper issues and failures in practice.