PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

A parliament that is accountable I 111
All the figures in the table need to be interpreted with caution, for a number
of reasons. First, they obscure considerable differences between individual
countries within each region, as a more detailed breakdown of the figures
indicates. Secondly, many respondents, especially the less educated or politically
aware, find it difficult to distinguish between different governmental
institutions, or between the record of particular political leaders and the institutions
they temporarily occupy. Thirdly, surveys suggest that people tend to
have a more positive assessment of their own constituency representative than
of the institution of parliament as a whole, suggesting that locality and individual
contact are significant and valued features of a representative system.
Nevertheless, these are not findings that can be treated with complacency.
It cannot be good for the health of democracy if its key representative institution
is held in such comparative low esteem. There is, however, some disagreement
among the political science community which attempts to interpret
these findings as to what the precise reason for them may be. In a paper prepared
for the IPU working group (of which she is a member) Marta Lagos, of
Latinobarometer, points out how trust in parliament has to be seen in the context
of trust in public institutions more generally. With respect to Latin
America, ‘trust’ or ‘confidence’ is typically a characteristic realised through
close personal connections, not a feature of wider social interactions or of
impersonal political institutions, whose outcomes lack the same level of predictability.
‘Society organises itself not in open interaction with third parties,
but rather in closed groups of people who are in a reachable sphere…. Trust
in Latin American society is present within networks in society, not between
networks.’ On this analysis, parliament itself has taken on the character of
another closed network, whose activities are not seen as relevant to the wider
society. ‘Now, laws passed by parliament have to first prove to benefit society
as a whole, and produce rules that are equal for all, before parliament becomes
a fully legitimate institution for the majority of the population.’ One of the
wider challenges for democracy, then, is how to break down the barriers of
distrust between different social networks, including that constituted by parliament
itself.
Not all analysts would attribute the same degree of importance to a general
lack of social trust in explaining low levels of confidence in parliament, at
least in respect of other regions. Richard Rose, for example, of Eurobarometer,
argues that for the former communist countries of eastern Europe, the main
explanation lies in the public’s assessment of institutional performance and the
behaviour of parliamentarians themselves (see, for example, William Mishler
and Richard Rose, What are the political consequences of trust? Centre for the