I think we can say that the pillars of representative liberal democracy – in particular, political participa
tion and the parties themselves – are creaking as a result of mass dis
trust of elites. If we look, for example, at the data presented by Robert Putnam, Susan Pharr, and Russell Dalton in their book ‘Disaffected Democracies’, we see that while support for democracy per se seems greater than ever, public faith in the agents of democracy (i.e. parties and politi
cians) and in representative insti
tutions has declined across the western world.