Does the democratic nation state remain a legitimate regime form in the current age of globalization? Sceptical assessments of the nation state's legitimacy and outright crisis diagnoses prevail in the academic literature, especially in the contributions of public-opinion researchers. Democracy's Deep Roots uses a novel, analytical approach to probe this topical question. Drawing on a comparative study of legitimation discourses in the quality press of four Western democracies (Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States), it shows that the levels and democratic foundations of public support for the nation state and its core institutions are surprisingly robust. There is little evidence for the fully-fledged erosion of legitimacy or for a transformation of its foundations in the public spheres of Western democracies. The book also identifies a number of discursive mechanisms that explain this finding and suggests an analytical framework for future research into the communicative dimension of legitimation processes.

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