DAVIDE ORSITTO
Identifying the Politics of Trust and Belonging in Nowadays’ Democracies: A Study of the Public Consensus infour European countries
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume III, Number 01 (2020): 50-62

IDENTIFYING THE POLITICS OF TRUST AND BELONGING IN
NOWADAYS’ DEMOCRACIES: A STUDY OF THE PUBLICCONSENSUS IN FOUR EUROPEAN COUNTRIESDavide Orsitto
Abstract
Recent voices among the communitarian thinkers led by Adam Seligman and David
Montgomery have formulated a new version of the communitarian critique,highlighting the downsides of Western political systems centered on human rights.
The communitarian critique in all its facets never seems to extinguish its emotional
appeal, but it would remain to a large extent inchoate if it is not backed up by
empirical evidence showing popular support for its arguments in a significant
number of countries. In its theoretical part, the paper reviews literature concerning
the communitarian critiques of liberalism. In its empirical part, the paper discusses
the fluctuation between liberal and communitarian policy-making in the agendasof the most important political parties in France, Italy, Germany, and the United
Kingdom. In the process, it presents indicators that reflect the values embedded inindividualism and communitarianism upon analyzing data from the Manifesto
Project database. It then weighs the scores of these indicators in the voting patternsof the main political parties in these four countries within the past half-century. The
empirical results show an overall downward trajectory towards morecommunitarian policy-making, which has also opened a debate on the role of thewelfare state in the framework of the communitarian argument.

In the post-cold war world of the 21 st century, the liberal democracy has become the mostadvertised frame of political systems to such an extent that Francis Fukuyama was able to easily
argue that the political history of the humankind was at the zenith of its path and that henceforth
the world order would find an asymptotic long-term equilibrium.1 The expected convergence
towards liberal democracy in the Western hemisphere also meant that individualism wasbelieved to attain the status of an unquestionable and prevailing value all over the world in theform of human rights. The latter rights are claim-rights that protect the individual human beings

1

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 3-7.

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as such from the state and demand from the latter the positive obligation to fulfill the integral
needs of each member of the society.
Recently, voices among the communitarian thinkers spearheaded by Adam Seligman
and David Montgomery rebut the aura of optimism surrounding the liberal order and argue thatpolitical systems centering on human rights may end up in a tragedy. 2 On their view, half acentury of human rights advocacy has seemingly promulgated an unstable democratic systemthat is prone to degenerate into autocracies, populism, and demagogy. Individual rights haveproliferated at the expense of any sense of shared belonging, which can be seen as a primary
ontological necessity of the human beings as social animals, as opposed to the liberalphilosophical conception of an unencumbered self. 3
The communitarian critique in all its facets seems to never exhaust its emotional appeal,
but it would remain largely inchoate if no empirical checks are operated to indicate whether its
arguments concur with a shared discomfort found in the democratic societies. The specificquestion that interests me here is To what extent is the communitarian critique a view sharedby a significant majority of European Union citizens? In the first part of the paper, I address
this quandary by reviewing the literature concerning the communitarian critique ofindividualism, giving special emphasis on Seligman and Montgomery’s critique of humanrights. In the second part, I analyze empirical evidence of the voting patterns of citizens of theEuropean Union, particularly in France, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom, using datafrom the Manifesto Project database. 4 Although the United Kingdom recently left the European
Union, it remains a very important country to study, especially in terms of understanding thevoting metrics relating to the Brexit watershed event. To respond to policy demands, in thepaper I will also try to set up reliable and comparable measures for all the analyzed states, which
will open perspectives for further studies on the role of the welfare state in the framework of
the communitarian argument.
1.
The Nuanced Conception of Liberty
Liberalism, rather than a one-sided, unambiguous political doctrine, is an array of discoursesthat prioritize the concept of liberty over other theorized values. It is a corpus of multi-facetedarguments, classical and contemporary, with a manifest proclivity towards freedom as the main
normative societal pillar.5 This definition does not encompass the essence of liberalism, whichlies in the axiomatic premise of what the value of liberty is. In this regard, Benjamin Constantargued that from the dawn of humanity up to the French Revolution, freedom existed as a

Adam B. Seligman and David W. Montgomery, “The Tragedy of Human Rights: Liberalism and the Loss ofBelonging,” Society, Vol. 56 (2019), pp. 1-2.
3Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 70.
4Andrea Volkens et al., The Manifesto Data Collection. Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR), Version 2020a(Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, 2020).
5
Gerald Gaus et al., “Liberalism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward N.Zalta, 2020), retrieved
from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/
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concept ascribed to the whole, or to the community. 6 He calls the liberty attached to collectivity
the liberty of the ancients, consisting in the right to collectively decide the functions of thegovernment, brought together in the public space, in order to make decisions regarding foreign
policy, home affairs, voting legislation, and deliberation. This kind of liberty implies a total
subjection of the individual to the whole, and has been very indicatively defined as holistic. 7
After the French Revolution in 1789, there was a significant paradigm shift in theWestern understanding of liberty. It was a result of a re-focusing from the aggregate entity thatwas free to the individual-monads that composed it: the liberty of the moderns was in its essencea liberty of the individual human beings. The individuals were henceforth free to speak up theirminds without censorship, could not be exiled, and were not only free from government
interference in private life but were also protected from the violation of that right by otherindividuals.8 Luis Dumont would refine and nuance the concepts of holistic and individual
liberty arguing that each of them can apply to different social classes within the same societies.
He would also trace the birth of the individualism that underlies our liberal values today backto the first Christian traditions which would gradually build up to overthrow the old, hierarchybased, tribalist values of collectivity. 9 Constant and Dumont, who were inspired by John Locke,
John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and the classical liberal tradition, helped develop the various
strains of liberal thinking that form the basis of today’s conception of liberty. The contemporary
individualist conception of liberty was further shaped by Isaiah Berlin (in his Two Concepts ofLiberty) and John Rawls (in his Political Liberalism). For us, of particular importance here willbe the powerful distinction that Berlin draws between negative liberty, or individuals’ rights tobe free of constraint imposed by other people or institutions, and positive liberty – the state
which emancipates the individual, empowers her action, and enables her to achieve her willedgoals.10
The review of the prominent thinkers who laid down the basics of the modern-day
political sense of liberty is necessary for understanding the contemporary American liberalism,
which I will refer to in this paper to elaborate on my claims. As Michael Walzer has it,liberalism is enacted in a society through the theoretical acceptance of four mobilities:
geographic free movement, social mobility, material mobility, and political mobility. 11 The
conception of the individual as free to move geographically, reach a desired place across thesocio-economic ladder, achieve or break institutional and personal relationship, choose apolitical leader or adhere to a party is at the basis of today’s notion of human rights. A liberalsociety thus upholds the four freedoms as claim-rights of the individuals; moreover, as Rawls

Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” Political Writings(London: Cambridge University press, 1819), pp. 1-2.
7
Ibid., p. 2.
8Ibid., p. 4.
9Luis Dumont, Essays on Individualism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 23-26.
10
Joshua Cherniss and Henry Hardy, “Isaiah Berlin,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward N. Zalta,2020).
11
Michael Walzer, “The Communitarian Critique of Capitalism,” Political Theory, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1990), pp. 623.
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argues, it grounds democracy and pluralism in the toleration of difference of opinions as anecessary condition for upholding the society’s liberty.12
1.1
The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism
Communitarianism is not a school of thought or an alternative political paradigm to liberalism
per se, unlike communism, state socialism, or fascism. It is an approach that emphasizes theimportance of individuals’ social relations and interactions that create a collectivity. At thesame time, it offers a powerful critique of liberalism. 13 Collectivities, according to this stance,sometimes need to be prioritized over the individual in policy making, especially in stewarding
global communities and tackling global threats. Furthermore, communitarians’ claim to debunkwhat appears to be the universal imposition of political individualism in the form of humanrights, which on their view is neither morally nor politically correct, as the forms of life andtraditions of particular collectivities vary considerably from context to context. 14
There are three main communitarian critiques of liberalism that are particularly
significant. The first one is rooted in Karl Marx’s German Ideology and holds that the liberalpolitical theory is a product of particular liberal social practice and that it universalizes its
discourse to obscure all other possibilities. In this way, Western societies have created a civil
context, in which the individual citizen believes to be absolutely free and unencumbered fromobligations to community but is actually deprived of his or her belonging to a group and its
traditions.15 By implementing their liberal freedoms, Western societies have deprived their
human members of their communities of reference, common heritage, and stories, and havethus reduced them to fragments, such that each of them is a stranger to the others. 16 Arguingthat liberalism puts forward the ideal of the Promethean humanity – the dogmatic and relentlesstrust in science, progress, and individuality – communitarians contend that the liberal view ofhistorical process is an illusion. The blind faith in reason has brought about a disenchantment
and irreversible losses of the sense of community and of a shared social universe. 17
The second communitarian critique of liberalism is famously known as the critique ofthe unencumbered self. It highlights the point that the liberal political philosophy tacitly
assumes an impoverished concept of the human self. To make its own case, neoliberalism
claims that a common standard respect of freedoms ought to be applied to every human being,
regardless of traditions and mores. It hails the act of dismissing thousands of years ofaccumulated knowledge and common heritage as an act of liberation of the unencumbered

12

Ibid., p. 16.
Daniel Bell, “Communitarianism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward N. Zalta, 2020); Seyla
Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, p. 71; Danièle
Hervieu-Léger, “Individualism, the Validation of Faith, and the Social Nature of Religion in Modernity,” inRichard K. Fenn (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion (London: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 161175.
14
Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, pp. 23–
38.
15
Michael Walzer, “The Communitarian Critique of Capitalism,” pp. 6-23.
16
Ibid, p. 9.
17Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, p. 69.
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individual, who is now ready to evolve. In this way, the liberal theory thoroughly misrepresents
the real life and the phenomenology of human existence, 18 as it rests on a version of the
Hobbesian assumption that views human connections as mere market friendships based on an
expected reciprocity and hinging on a narrowly defined self-interest.19 Conversely, against the
self-perpetuating hypnotic discourse of liberalism, communitarians argue that being engaged insocial interaction and communities of reference is in the very nature of the human enterprise.
The unencumbered human being, cut loose from nearly all social bonds, is only a mythical,
lonely figure completely disengaged with reality, as much as the Promethean ideal cherished in
the liberal narrative. Finally, according to this critique, the remarkable divide between theeveryday need for communal experience and the liberal ideology engenders in the individual a
deep psychological problem which is a direct consequence of isolation and hinders
innovation.20
1.2

The Tragedy of the Human Rights: Communities of Trust against Societies ofConfidence
A third, recently released communitarian critique of liberalism is formulated by Seligman andMontgomery, who argue that the liberal moral institution of human rights as prioritized overnatural or constitutional rights has played a silent role in the current rise of authoritarian andantiliberal leaders.21 Ever since the bipolar system of the cold war collapsed along with the
Berlin Wall, liberalism has been getting a ground on the international arena, but while
universalizing the Western values as undeniable virtues, it has also neglected other meaningful
human necessities and moral worldviews, which anchor the dimension of belonging into thesense of human identity.22 The argument thus points to the socio-cultural processes involved in
the formation of the human identities: communities play a pivotal role in framing the sense of
belonging, which is the backbone of cognitive action, as well as of one’s worldview and ability
to engage with the world and others.
Echoing Nietzsche, Seligman and Montgomery claim that the conception of humanrights has (1) institutionalized a situation in which the notion of God, the archetypical common
good, is abolished via secularism; (2) fostered the idea of the morally autonomous individual;and (3) pushed towards the protection of different sets of individual rights, rather than of acollective idea of the common good. Consequently, the tendency to safeguard the conceptionof human rights has given a rise to a community of strangers with no common moral values,
which is held together by the judicial system, with justice conceived as the highest virtue. Thus,
the peculiar deficit ensuing from the existential alienation of the individual from her kindred
has brought about a latent, sublimated longing for community, which finds an expression in agreater sense of national, regional, or religious belonging. It is to be noted here that as human18

Ibid., p. 72.
Ibid., p. 73.
20
Michael Walzer, “The Communitarian Critique of Capitalism,” pp. 10-11.
21Adam B. Seligman and David W. Montgomery, “The Tragedy of Human Rights: Liberalism and the Loss ofBelonging,” pp. 203-204.
22
Ibid., p. 205.
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rights by themselves provide no sense of belonging, no sentiment of a shared community or
special bonds, they can be enacted uniformly only by bureaucratic organizations and welfare
agencies. This however has brought up an unfortunate effect – the remarkable rift between an
abstract regime of claim rights and what Seligman and Montgomery call a “community ofmutual care and shared belonging.”23
From this viewpoint, the proposed concept of belonging appears as the very antithesisof human alienation. Communities of trust feature shared dispositions and morality, feelings ofsolidarity and common experience, familiarity and peace, as well as a sense of security spurringfrom the idea of sameness. For their part, human-rights-centered societies cannot be further
from the idea of trust or belonging: they foster multicultural values and diverse moral beliefs
that are upheld via bureaucratic legal institutions, thus tacitly equating the idea of the other asa danger, which in turn requires security. The rise of right-wing populist movements seems aninevitable corollary of this analysis: xenophobia, identity politics, and group supremacy are
instruments that can easily canalize a degenerate and disoriented longing for trust andbelonging. The challenge here then is how to virtuously cultivate the claims to belonging to acommunity without building walls and exercising violence during the assimilation of refugees
and migrants, without promoting racist and ethnocentric policies of segregation, which entail
authoritarianism and apartheid. 24
Seligman and Montgomery end their case by urging us to take belonging seriously inpolicies – such as development projects, awareness campaigns, and political undertakings –towards seeing difference as a resource, rather than a trigger for security. 25 These authors
however do not go in-depth with a policy advise or a slightest indication over which institution
should be tasked with making belonging the central societal framework. Now, having set thebackground of the individualism-communitarianism debate, I will proceed with a discussion of
the extent to which the broad issues raised by the communitarian critiques are reflected in thevoting pattern of three European Founding Member States with the addition of the United
Kingdom.
II.
Methodology and Data Analysis
For a good sense of whether the communitarian critique matches the wishes, the desires, andthe visions of a significant portion of the contemporary democratic societies, I shall searchthrough the data of the comparative manifesto project. 26 The Manifesto covers the mostinsightful and updated resources used in the mainstream research literature, which synthesize
the ideological stances of more than a thousand political parties on a number of policy areas, as
published in their manifestos in more than 50 countries between 1945 and 2020. Morespecifically, the manifesto project indicates the share of the manifestos of the political parties
in a specific policy area in terms of the number of sentences devoted to it. Thus, a value of x in

23

Ibid., pp. 206-207.
Ibid., pp. 207-208.
25
Ibid., p. 208.
26
Andrea Volkens et al, The Manifesto Data Collection. Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR), Version
2020a.
24

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one of the variables indicates that x percent of the sentences in the party’s manifesto represented
in that row were assigned to a policy category by an expert coder. 27 The data in the Manifesto
are indicative for the stances of the various parties in terms of key policy areas, examples ofwhich may be welfare extension and retrenchment, tendency towards military spending or
peacefulness, preference for traditional or progressive values et cetera. 28 The indicated policy
areas are listed in numbers and coded in terms of variables, which cover the key positions of
the political parties on the most important issues.29
I have operationalized the citizens’ demand for individualist or communitarian policies
across the chosen countries for the period from 1990 to 2020 by composing the indicators of
Individualism and Holism Demand for each election in the countries of France, Germany, Italy,
and the United Kingdom. The two metrics are meant to complement the Rile Index of the
Manifesto Project, which assembles various policy demands into a measure for the right-leftdivide on an ideological level. I have thus defined individualism as a set of liberal values setting
forth the predominance of the interest of the individuals and non-state organizations(supranational, sub-national) over the nation state, corporations, religious institutions and tradeunions, herewith understood as the archetypal collective institutions. The metric Individualism
Demand is composed by the sum of the frequencies of words in party manifestos that coded
positive for: (a) support for the European Union, desirability of increasing the Union’scompetences and erosion of state sovereignty; (b) favorable mentions of federalism ordecentralization of political and economic power; (c) necessity for administrative efficiency,such as cutting down on civil service; (d) the importance of the modernization of industry,technology, and science; (e) limiting state expenditure on education; (f) unfavorable mentionsof patriotism and nationalism; (g) opposition to traditional or religious moral values, withsupport for divorce, abortion, separation for church and state; (h) freedom and human rights,featuring favorable mentions of importance of personal freedoms, the idea of individualism; (i)mentions fostering multiculturalism and ethnic heterogeneity; (j) negative stance towards tradeunions and labor groups. Upon summing up the frequencies of the listed policy areas, I havemultiplied the score of the share of the votes that each party won in parliament to obtain aweighed score accounting for the public demand for individualist policy areas.
As an antithesis to individualism, I have created the Holism Demand index, which isformed by the sum total of frequencies of policy areas that imply a preference for a collective
welfare over that of the individual. The collectivity reference may vary according to the politicalnarrative, including over policy areas such as the environment and the preservation of global
commons, the safeguarding state sovereignty, as well as the protection of vulnerable groups
and religious institutions. The variables chosen for this index are: (a) negative references tointernational cooperation and/or ones favoring national independence and autarky; (b)Thomas König et al., “Estimating Party Positions Across Countries and Time – A Dynamic Latent Variable
Model for Manifesto Data,” Political Analysis (2013), pp. 468–491.
28
Will Lowe, Kenneth Benoit, Slava Mikhaylov, and Michael Laver, “Scaling Policy Preferences from Coded
Political Texts,” Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2011), pp. 123–155.
29
Andrea Volkens et al, The Manifesto Data Collection. Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR), Version
2020a.
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Euroscepticism; (c) positive attitude towards corporations and government; (d) positive stancefor Keynesian demand management, such as increase in aggregate demand and investment inpublic infrastructures; (e) support for anti-growth policies, such as ones in line withenvironmentalist claims against productive growth; (f) favorable mentions of environmental
protection, including on the preservation of natural resources, the protection of animal and plantrights; (g) favorable mentions of traditional morality, that includes censorship for immoral
behavior, maintenance of the traditional family, and support for religious institutions; (h)support for equality, special protection for vulnerable groups, and fair redistribution of
resources; (i) negative references to multiculturalism, appeals to cultural homogeneity insociety; (j) support for the agricultural sector and farming communities. 30 The Holism Demandindex is aggregated as a mirror image of the Individualism Demand index, featuring an equal
number of control variables, which are summed up into one score for each political party overtime, then multiplied by the share of the vote that the party received in each election. To
calculate a comparative score, I have summed up the two scores of all the parties weighed by
the vote share for each election, so as to obtain the overall preference towards individualism
and holism. I have finally drawn the difference between the obtained scores of Individualism
Demand and Holism Demand that a specific country featured in parliament at each election
point. In this way, a graph is created whereby scores above zero reflect the relative propensity
towards individualism that the majority of a population has voted for in a country, whereas
scores below zero show the relative preference towards communitarian policies. The graphs
containing the findings are displayed in the Appendix at the end of the article.
III.
Analyzing Comparative Voter Preferences for Individualism and Holism
As Figure 1 shows, the four countries examined in the period 1970-2020 display an overall shift
in the trend of public consensus towards communitarian policy making – the parties that havea greater voter share over time show a tendency toward supporting the communitarianarguments that compose the Holism Demand Index. Italy is an interesting example of change
in the ideological resource of its political parties, scoring highly individualist with both peaks
and troughs (in fact the absolute maximum of the function) between 1972 and 2008; thendropping more than thirty-five percentage points of its support for individualism from 2008 to
2013. Figure 2 offers a specific picture of how the Italian parties range in terms of bothindividualism and holism on the different elections, as well as an explanation on the shift fromindividualism to holism. After 2008, the preference for holism emerges with an increase in thevoter share of the Five-Star Movement (coded in yellow under the label special party) and Lega
Nord (coded in brown as nationalist party). For the same period, the main democratic parties(the left leaning Partito Democratico and Liberi e Uguali, as well as the conservative Forza
Italia) also converge to lower scores for individualism, hypothetically attempting to competewith the populist parties as the voters turn to the latter.
For its part, France features as the most holist-scoring country over time, starting froma total of 4% in holism in the 1972 elections, reaching a relative maximum of 1% individualistin 1986, and then an absolute minimum of 13 points in holism in 1997, before going back to
30

Ibid.

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lower holist values along the lines of its present-day communitarianism. The graph in Figure 4
also shows a lasting tendency toward holism in almost all of the key French parties, of which
the highest-scoring are the nationalists of Front National, the socialists of France Insoumise,and the French Communist Party. The absolute minimum of 13 points in holism is due to thestrong performance of Front National reaching 14% of the voter share, the strong ideologicalscore of France Insoumise, and the overall holist attitudes of the other parties in the country.
After a brief interval of positive individualism under the Fillon cabinet in 2007, the score goesback to the holist mean trend values towards the present.
Next, Figures 1 and 3 indicate, as intuitively expected, that the United Kingdom has on
average a preference for individualist political stances, reaching a positive peak of 13 points inthis regard in 1983 under the continuing Thatcher government. After 1992, the country embarks
on a negative-sloping trajectory towards milder levels of individualism, reaching a local troughin 2001 and 2005 under the Blair leadership. A higher score of individualism characterizes thefirst Cameron government in 2010, and as Brexit is discussed and becomes closer within his
second cabinet, the country turns holist, scoring two percentage points in holism for the firsttime. Interestingly, as Theresa May assumes office with a mandate for government in theaftermath of the Brexit referendum, the parliament assumes an individualist score of 8 points,
whereas as Boris Johnson is elected in office in 2019 to replace May, the United Kingdom turns
holist once again. The ideological change that generates the negative sloping trend towards
holistic features is mainly produced by the Conservatives, which adopted less individualistic
stances in 2015 and 2019, as well as by UKIP, whose high score in the communitarianarguments significantly affects the curve.
Finally, Figures 1 and 5 showing Germany’s trajectory prove interesting to read. In theGerman case, the aggregated data from 1970 to 1990 belong to the Federal Republic of
Germany, which after that incorporated under international law the German Democratic
Republic within its continuous legal identity. In the examined timespan, the Federal Republicof Germany shows a sinusoidal trend, reaching the highest individualist score of 17 under the
Helmut Schmidt chancellorship in 1976. Then, the trend embarks on a negative slope in thereunification period, reaching the highest score in holism under chancellor Helmut Kohl in
1990. After that, the country climbs up along individualist preferences, reaching a local
maximum under the first Angela Merkel cabinet in 2002. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial
crisis, and throughout the European sovereign debt crisis of 2012, the Merkel cabinets turnedmore holist as a consequence of the deep change in the public preferences induced by the
economic depression. These changes are detectable in Figure 4, which sheds light on how themost important German parties advanced their ideological stance over time. The CDU and theFree Democratic Party have always maintained an individualist stance, whereas the more leftleaning parties of Die Linke, the Greens, and SPD have proven more versatile.
Overall, the findings show over time a long-term tendency of the public attitudes
towards communitarian policies, namely Eurosceptic, national corporatist, and protectionist
stances. This might be explained by the intense period of stagnation and depression following
to the financial crisis and the later period of Brexit. Sensing a change in public preferences, themajor political parties in Europe have adopted an inward-looking re-orientation, which

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currently appears to be deepening. Italy shows a greater volatility in the scores, turning fromone of the most proactive European Union and globalization supporter to being moreEurosceptic and less multiculturalist. Further studies can be conducted to extend the analysisof these composed scores to all EU member states, or to an in-depth analysis of theindustrialized countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment (OECD). A further next step could also be to include a score of the countries’
political ideologies in terms of their right/left narratives and create – along with theindividualism-holism – a four-dimensional axis to achieve a better picture of the trends in the
public attitudes. It is finally interesting to note that, prima facie, the countries that are wellknown for their high score in the democracy indexes (such as those of Freedom House) show asteady orientation of their public attitudes towards a return to the community. Seligman andMontgomery’s insight thus seems to be attested by an initial empirical analysis, although thesmall sample can only have a statistical value of limited significance.
IV.
Conclusion
This paper first offers a review of the key points and the various nuances of liberalism, including
the policies of individualism, which are a substantial part of it. It then outlines the three maincommunitarian critiques of liberalism, drawing on Seligman and Montgomery’s argument of
the perceived lack of trust and belonging in societies where individual differences arehighlighted and upheld by law while the need of security is paramount. The paper further gives
a preliminary answer to the question of the correlation between Seligman and Montgomery’s
intuition and the empirical voting patterns of the electorate of the three largest EU founding
states and the United Kingdom. The findings from the four countries, which can be expanded
further on by statistically significant studies concerning a larger pool of countries, show that,over time, a remarkable public sentiment has taken a shape towards communitarian policies
and at the expense of liberalism. This tendency has given a rise to Euroscepticism, corporatism,a growing urgency to act on the climate change, and a push towards Keynesian economic
policy, all of which can be detected even in countries with great individualist traditions, suchas Germany and UK. The findings reflect the growing share of positive public attitudes towards
the politics of trust and belonging to a community, which the preceding liberal policy making
may have precipitated. As a shift towards higher levels of communitarianism is detected, further
econometric studies could determine what would be the main watershed events that engender
this change. It would be also interesting to find out whether the politics of belonging describedby Seligman and Montgomery can be channeled through the institutionalization of a stronger
welfare state. It is indeed clear that what Albena Azmanova 31 defines as a broad societal
agreement on social rights under the ticket of welfare state is, so far, the only componential
entity of the contemporary democratic societies that is capable of catering to the politics ofbelonging as advanced by the communitarians.

31

Albena Azmanova, Capitalism on Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

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APPENDIX
Figure 1: Individualism-Holism Policy Demand Score

Country Overview Ideology Map
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
1960
-5%

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

2030

-10%
-15%
Italy

FranceGermany

United Kingdom

Figure 2: Ideological Map of Most Popular Italian Political Parties
30%
25%

ITALY

20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
1960
-5%

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

-10%
-15%

CHR Centrists

Forza Italia and CONS

Democrats

Lega and Nationalists

Special (m5s)

TOTAL

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

60

Volume III, No. 01/2020

2030

DAVIDE ORSITTO
Identifying the Politics of Trust and Belonging in Nowadays’ Democracies: A Study of the Public Consensus infour European countries

Figure 3: Ideological Map of the Most Popular British Political Parties
16%
14%
12%
10%
8%
6%

4%
2%
0%
1960
-2%

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

2030

-4%
Conservatives

Labor

UKIP

TOTAL

Figure 4: Ideology Map of the Most Popular French Political Parties
6%
4%
2%
0%
1970
-2%

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2015

2020

-4%
-6%
-8%
-10%
-12%
-14%
Conservatives

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONSGreensCommunists, France Insoumise

61

Front National

Total

Volume III, No. 01/2020

DAVIDE ORSITTO
Identifying the Politics of Trust and Belonging in Nowadays’ Democracies: A Study of the Public Consensus infour European countries

Figure 5: Ideology Map of the Most Important German Political PartiesGERMANY
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2015

2020

-5%
-10%
CDU
Free Democratic Party
Grune

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONSSPD
Afd NAT62

LINKE and PS
Total

Volume III, No. 01/2020