Russell Dalton has written an impressive, thoughtful, and useful comparative analysis of the origins, character, and consequences of variations in public support for a number of advanced industrial democracies, all of them long-term (since 1960) member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Following David Easton's landmark study (A Systems Analysis of Political Life, 1965), Dalton distinguishes three broad objects of political support—political communities, political regimes, and political authorities—and two types of support, diffuse and specific. These are operationalized by the author in Table 2.1. Most of his empirical data are derived from a variety of National Election Studies in member states, as well as World Value and Eurobarometer surveys. The book is organized in three parts.

Following an introductory chapter, Part I (Chapter 2) presents empirical evidence tracking changes in public political support in advanced industrial democracies. Part II examines rival theories that have been posited to explain changing public orientations toward democratic political systems. As an organizational device, Dalton employs the assumption of Allan Kornberg and Harold Clarke (Citizens and Community, 1992, p. 21) that there are two principal sources of political support. One is the socialization and resocialization experiences of people. These generate the values, attitudes, and perspectives that provide the context in which they make cost–benefit calculations. The latter are the second source of support in that they concern the way political actors perform and political institutions and processes function. Dalton examines the first source in Chapters 4 and 5 and the second in 6 and 7. Chapter 3 begins the exercise by summarizing the major theories and providing some initial empirical tests. Part III (Chapters 8 and 9) examines the political consequences of variations in support and some of the major challenges and choices political authorities face in maintaining the continued viability of the states they lead.

Among the author's findings are that people are able to make meaningful distinctions among objects of support and that both the levels and the correlates of support vary for different political objects. For example, judgments about governmental performance correlate with support for incumbent authorities and institutions but not with community support (Chapter 3). Over the 1960–2000 period, political support has dropped disproportionately among the better educated and the young, rather than people at the margins of politics (Chapter 4).

This is in part a function of the gap between what citizens expect of governments and what the latter produce: “It is not so much that governments produce less, but that citizens expect more” (p. 151). Contributing to these increased expectations is the proliferation of interest groups, nongovernmental organizations, and new social movements that have assumed some of the interest aggregation/articulation functions that historically have been the province of political parties. These groups make more demands on government and increase the potential for people to feel that government is not addressing their concerns sufficiently. Negative evaluations of governmental performance and the willingness of the media to report on the peccadilloes, large and small, of politicians, on graft, on corruption, on waste, and so forth, as well as the sheer increase of the kind of media able to report on these matters, also have contributed to the erosion of support for governments, at least in the short term. However, Dalton argues that these have played only a secondary role (p. 198).

Not surprisingly, the erosion has had consequences. Thus, for example, the decline of trust in government erodes feelings that citizens should comply with government's directives, whether the latter involve paying taxes, following regulations, or a general respect for the law (p. 186). It has also discouraged public participation in conventional forms of electoral politics and greater approval of and engagement in elite-challenging forms of political action.

To repeat, Dalton acknowledges that by any measure, public confidence in and support for political authorities, political parties, and political institutions have declined over the past generation in advanced industrial democracies, although the pace and timing of the declines have varied by nations. Moreover, as noted, the decline of support has been disproportionately greater among younger upper-status groups. That is on the one hand.

On the other, support for political communities and pride in one's nation have held constant in most democracies (p. 192), and the younger, better-educated elements that have been the most critical of governments are also the strongest adherents to the norms and ideals of the democratic process. In brief, what they appear to want is more, not less, democracy and for their leaders to live up to democracy's ideals. He observes that the desire to move toward the democratic ideal that leads to periods of dissatisfaction is what has sparked the political reform that has been central to the expansion of democracy (p. 203).

Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices has much to recommend it. Dalton writes easily and well, and each chapter ends with a useful summary and discussion of the matters that have been addressed. He also is very much in command of the data on which this study rests. This is no small achievement given the 40-year time period and the number of states that are the focus of his investigation. It would have been relatively easy to figuratively drown in the data. Instead, he has marshaled them in an impressive series of tests of a variety of theoretical assumptions.

Throughout the book, Dalton is periodically skeptical but not dismissive of some of the explanations that have been offered for the decline of support for democratic governments and their leaders. This is especially the case in his concluding chapter, which, in a number of respects, is a kind of model of how to address the “why” and “so what” questions that almost inevitably arise in systematic, comparative, empirically grounded investigations.

That said, some of the strengths of the analysis of a relatively large number of cases over a substantial (40 years) time period also generates some problems. With respect to data presentation, for example, although some of the graphic displays are illuminating, much of the tabular material that features tables of 50-plus cells will present a daunting challenge to even the most interested readers. In addition, although some of the data available to the author are derived from panel studies, most of them are from cross-sectional studies. Of necessity, this constrains the confidence with which generalizations about trends and over-time changes in attitudes, values, and behavior can either be posited or accepted. In addition, the data from some of the national election studies were probably derived from face-to-face interviews, others by computer-assisted telephone interviews, and still others from mail-back questionnaires. Surely, this has resulted in variations in data quality and reliability. I noted above that Dalton periodically exhibits a healthy skepticism about some of the theoretical assumptions and explanations that have characterized research in this area. At times (p. 133), he also is skeptical about using some of the data pertinent to this investigation. One wishes, however, that he might have exercised the same degree of skepticism about the data available to him as he is of the uses others have made of it. But these are relatively minor caveats about what is, on the whole, a genuine contribution to systematic comparative analysis by an accomplished social scientist.