I invited professor Gerry Stoker of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom to speak at a symposium in September on the theme of how to overcome people's disenchantment with democratic political systems. He is far from alone. A number of British political scientists in recent years have published a series of books discussing the paradoxes of democratic political systems.
The paradoxes of democratic political systems can be roughly summarized as follows: Democracy spread across the globe after the collapse of one-party rule in the former Soviet bloc countries in the early 1990s. Democratization made headway in East Asia, Latin America and more recently in the Middle East. As if in inverse proportion to such progress, however, people in democratic nations are becoming increasingly disenchanted with politics and are drenched in a feeling of powerlessness.
When asked why British political scholars are paying attention to such a phenomenon, Stoker's answer was that the scholars themselves became disenchanted after witnessing what eventually happened to the Labour administration that swept to power in 1997. I myself observed how Tony Blair took office with great fanfare when I was studying at Oxford University. That experience led me to make various proposals back home to turn the Democratic Party of Japan into a political force like New Labour and enable a change of government in Japan. After witnessing the final result of the DPJ-led change of government, I felt the same sentiment as Stoker and the other British academics.