As a result, the book presents a coherent whole, rather than just an odd collection of essays, even if the ultimate arguments that come from it include contradictions and qualifications. The first team of essays addresses the decline in public confidence in government. Russell Hardin wonders, accurately in my view, if the editors may have posed the question of declining faith in government backward. Distrust of government has a long history in the United States, but goes beyond the old American exceptionalism argument. For government to build trust, it needs to perform useful tasks for constituencies.
Limited government is coupled, however, with essentially unlimited expectations.
The second team of authors looks at the declining capacity of the trilateral governments. Legitimation of government, Fritz Scharpf argues, is generally a function of government delivering good and services, a point echoed by Alberto Alesina and Romain Wacziarg, who focus on the fiscal and political constraints that growing internationalization places on governments. As public education and mobilization has increased, governments face increased demands, even as they can provide less. Increasingly, what governments do provide is less public goods and more transfer payments. This sort of policy, essentially brokerage, undermines support for public purposes, and heightens fears about government withdrawal at the same time that it breeds suspicion of other claimants for government goods, and government itself.