There is a palpable sense of crisis in Western democracies. The rise of right-wing populist
parties across Europe the erosion of constitutional checks and balances in Hungary and Poland
and the 2016 Brexit vote in the UK have all stirred significant alarm regarding the present
state of democracy and prospects for its future. And political leaders and would-be leaders
have not hesitated to stoke perceptions of crisis in pursuit of their own ends. However on the
whole Europeans in 2019 were just as satisfied with the working of democracy as they had been
15 years earlier. Trust in national parliaments and politicians remained virtually unchanged.
While 'angry opponents of immigration' dominated the headlines most Europeans' attitudes
toward immigration were becoming significantly warmer not more hostile. In these and other
respects the conventional wisdom about a 'crisis of democracy' in contemporary Europe is
strikingly at odds with evidence from public opinion surveys. Drawing from a major survey of
European public opinion Bartels summarizes broad trends from 2002 through 2019 focusing on
attitudes commonly taken as symptomatic of a 'crisis of democracy ' including dissatisfaction
with the workings of democracy distrust of political elites ideological polarization and
antipathy to European integration. He finds with remarkable consistency across issues that
the European public does not see their democracy as in crisis. Bartels then goes on to show how
these findings complicate the sense for instance that the surge in support for right-wing
populist parties is driven by a 'demand' for such groups from the public. Rather this and
other troubling changes has much more to do with the 'supply' of groups within the political
elite. It is these elite groups Bartels ultimately finds that have contributed to the erosion
of democratic norms and institutions in places like Poland and Hungary-not an increasingly
restive European public
