Citizen Confidence in Social and Political Institutions in a Changing World

The focus in some literatures towards the end of the 20th century on the crisis of governability and on challenges to governance in the western world has given way in the early part of the 21st century to a focus on broader social and political uncertainty in the face of a world now dominated by ongoing threats of major terrorist activity. These developments, together with evidence of declining trust and social capital, have placed considerable pressure on a range of major social and political institutions. This paper uses survey research data to investigate public confidence in a number of prominent organisations and institutions in Australia and how this confidence is changing. The paper considers not only the level of public confidence, but also the dimensionality of such attitudes and the socio-political factors that shape them. The paper concludes with a consideration of the theoretical and practical implications of the findings