State of Disgrace: Popular Political Discontents about the Dutch State in the 2000s

While it is widely acknowledged that politics and politicians have fallen from grace among large parts of the public in western democracies, it is less clear what the latter’s political discontents are about. To find out, we performed an interpretative content analysis of the letters to the editor of the largest popular Dutch newspaper in the 2000s (2000–2009). It yielded three empirically grounded discourses of pol-itical discontents about ‘the state’—shorthand for the government, its agencies, officials, judges, politicians and political parties—‘the incompetent state’, ‘the alie-nated state ’ and ‘the corrupted state’. The relevance of these findings is subse-quently discussed in the light of research on political distrust and contemporary populism. Over the last decades, governments and politicians have steadily fallen from grace in western societies (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, 1995; Pharr and Putnam, 2000; Dalton, 2005). Although this has by now become a sociological mainstay (see however: Van de Walle et al., 2008), it remains by and large unclear what political discontents among the public are actually about (cf. Kaina, 2008; Hay an