It is widely assumed that citizens in many countries have become disengaged from the conventional channels of political participation. This book compares systematic evidence for electoral turnout, party membership, and civic activism in countries around the world and suggests good reasons to question popular assumptions of pervasive decline.

Before proceeding to articulate this argument, so that the wary might be warned before proceeding further, we should note that interpretations of the contemporary state of political participation can and often do fall into multiple potential traps.

One is the danger of mythologizing a romantic Golden Age when all the town hall meetings were packed, all the voting booths were overflowing, and all the citizens were above average. It is all too easy to equate change with decline. Familiar patterns of our parents' and grandparents' generations are regarded nostalgically as the norm, in a misty-eyed Jimmy Stewart small-town-America sort of way. But change can simply mean adaptation to circumstances.

Ethnocentrism is another common danger. The bulk of research on political participation originates in America, and it is sometimes assumed that political fashions are like the export of McDonald's, Nikes, or Levis, so that patterns that first emerge in the United States (or even in California) will probably become evident later among other Western publics. Yet in this regard, as in many others, as Lipset suggests, there may well be American exceptionalism. The individualistic values and particular constitutional structures created at the founding of the United States set a specific cultural milieu, so that civic ills do not necessarily creep north over the Canadian border, let alone spread widely like a virus throughout Western political systems.