Comparative Politics

high unemployment

social spending

cuts in social spendin

protesters say they so distrust their country’s political class and its pandering to established interest groups

their political leaders, regardless of party, had been so thoroughly captured by security concerns, ultra-Orthodox groups and other special interests

anticorruption measure

less hierarchical, more participatory

the political system has abandoned its citizens.”

That consensus, championed by scholars like Francis Fukuyama in his book “The End of History and the Last Man,” has been shaken if not broken by a seemingly endless succession of crises

continuing European and American debt crisis —