Malaise as a Symptom of Conflict: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Scholars of advanced industrial democracies first began to speak of “malaise”—then defined much more loosely than the editors of this volume have done—in the early 1970s. In the United States, Vietnam and Watergate revealed the problem of rapidly declining trust in government and a broad withdrawal of citizens from representative institutions. Comparative research found similar trends unfolding in other advanced democracies. The publication of the controversial study by Crozier, Huntington, and Watanake, The Crisis of Democracy (1975) set the tone for the joyless 1970s. Among political analysts, crisis theories abounded; their ideas even found their way into the discourse of political practitioners, as in Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise” speech of July 1979. Fittingly, the decade closed with the publication of Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture Revisited (1980), in which several of the contributors dramatically recanted Almond and Verba’s earlier (1963) hypotheses about the supposedly enduring cultural bases of robust political support in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States.