Patterns of democracy and democratic satisfaction: Results from a comparative conjoint experiment

Patterns of democracy and democratic satisfaction: Results from a comparative conjoint experiment

Abstract. This study presents the results from a series of conjoint experiments evaluating how the various components of political systems affect citizens' satisfaction with democracy. Compared to earlier studies, our approach is unique in that we were able to disentangle the effects of otherwise highly collinear variables corresponding to three defining features of any political system, namely one, access to power, two, the policy-making process and three, performance. We fielded identical conjoint experiments in countries with significant variations across the key independent variables: France, Hungary and Italy. Overall, our study supports the view that citizens are more satisfied with democracy in consensus systems than in majoritarian democracies, while it also contributes to identifying the respective weight of the specific components of political systems. Respondents across all countries recognize that proportionality and party system fragmentation magnify their voices by creating a more representative political climate. With regard to output legitimacy, we find that respondents identify good economic performance and public probity as important features of a well-performing democracy. The positive effect of the legislators' constituency orientation on satisfaction with democracy is a particularly noteworthy result that is currently understudied in the literature. Moreover, the state of the economy has by far the biggest impact on satisfaction with democracy, which indicates a highly materialistic view of democracy in all three countries.

Introduction

Satisfaction with democracy may play a key role in the future of liberal democracy. Although citizens' dissatisfaction with how democracy works does not necessarily erode support for the democratic principle itself, popular satisfaction can strengthen system stability and prevent radical changes. The growing dissatisfaction with democracy on a global scale over the past decades can therefore be interpreted as a worrying trend. And even though there is no uniform decline in the level of satisfaction with democracy across Europe, the widespread dissatisfaction found in some parts of the continent is also deemed preoccupying. Therefore, despite the already vast literature dedicated to satisfaction with democracy, further analysis is warranted to understand the drivers of satisfaction and the dramatic cross-country differences.

Ample evidence links satisfaction with democracy to individual factors, most prominently - but not exclusively - voting for government parties, the individuals' economic situation, political interest, education as well as general satisfaction. The literature on satisfaction with democracy has also highlighted the determining role played by contextual features such as political institutions and system performance.

Two thousand twenty-three. In this article, we contribute to the line of inquiry which, building on the seminal work of Anderson and Guillory, nineteen ninety-seven, argues that patterns of democracy influence people's assessment of and satisfaction with political systems. The controversy notably revolves around the compared merits of majoritarian and consensus democracies, with Lijphart arguing that citizens in consensus systems are significantly more satisfied with the democratic system in their countries than citizens in majoritarian democracies. The notable advantage but also, in our view, one major limitation of Lijphart's approach is that it encapsulates a broad range of institutional and political features into a limited number of democratic models. In fact, by reducing many institutional characteristics into one single or a limited number of dimensions, this approach risks overlooking specific elements and mechanisms likely to drive citizens' satisfaction with democracy. In other words, broad encompassing categorizations of democracies leave out the possibility that their constitutive components can have independent and diverging effects on citizens' evaluations of the political system. Therefore, and despite major advances in this research field, determining to what extent specific features of democratic systems are perceived by citizens and influence their level of satisfaction with democracy remains both a theoretical and an empirical challenge. Against this backdrop, the objective of our research is to disentangle which characteristics of democratic institutions and their performance matter the most for citizens' satisfaction with democracy.

Another, methodological challenge that our research aims to address relates to the so-called 'too many variables and too few countries' problems inherent to cross-national comparative research designs. As pointed out by Aarts and Thomassen in their important study of the institutional determinants of satisfaction with democracy, 'at the macro level, it is generally not feasible to disentangle the impact of different system characteristics because of interdependencies' and it might therefore be preferable to 'restrict the model specification to the most crucial variables', thus leaving out potential important predictors of satisfaction with democracy. Another strategy for avoiding the shortcomings of standard observational analyses, and one we adopt here, is to rely on an experimental design. This enables us to simultaneously control for a wide array of country-level attributes without making ecological inferences as is common in studies that use country-level data. Besides, by relying on an experimental design, we can randomly generate scenarios that we otherwise would not be able to directly observe due to the limited number of combinations in the real world. Yet, we also consider the possibility that citizens' criteria for assessing the quality of democratic systems vary across contexts, an observation often discussed in the literature. We, therefore, conducted the survey experiment in three countries that differ significantly across important political attributes: France, Hungary and Italy.

In our empirical quest to connect satisfaction with democracy to country-level factors, we rely on three constitutive dimensions of democracy that we further break down into eight attributes: one, access to power (electoral system proportionality, ballot structure and party system fragmentation), two, the policy-making process (government fragmentation, government majority in parliament and the legislators' local orientation) and three, performance (economic performance and corruption). Compared to previous studies which focus on the effects of a limited number of macro-features (usually one at a time), our analysis encompasses a broader range of democratic institutions, including features such as constituency service that have been left out of most studies despite them being key to the linkage function of democracies. In contrast to the vast literature emphasizing the importance of the national context, we find a surprisingly uniform picture across the three countries in our sample. Respondents across all countries recognize that proportionality and party system fragmentation magnify their voice by creating a more representative political climate. With regard to the output legitimacy of the political system, we find that respondents identify good economic performance and public probity as important features of a well-performing democracy. The decision-making process appears to play a greater and slightly different role than what is usually predicted in the literature. First, the observed effect of government fractionalization fits well with the idea that consensus systems featuring coalition governments generate more satisfaction with democracy. Second, we also find that citizens are less perceptive of the government's parliamentary majority: the impact of government type is not always statistically significant and may thus be context-dependent. Third, the positive effect of the legislator's constituency orientation on satisfaction with democracy is a particularly noteworthy result that is found less frequently in the literature.

Competing attributes of satisfaction with democracy

Prior research demonstrates that beyond micro-level predictors, different types of macro-level, contextual factors influence citizens' SWD. With regard to political institutions, scholars have looked at, among others, the type of electoral rules, including compulsory voting and district size, or the type of regime. Regarding performance measures, government effectiveness, the rule of law and corruption, the quality of social protection, how governments solve collective action problems, income inequality, economic performance and procedural fairness are put forth as determinants of SWD. Typically, these features of democratic systems are treated in isolation: it is thus impossible to compare their effects or to determine whether such effects hold in combination with other factors. Our aim is to overcome these limitations by incorporating into a single model, a broader range of institutional and contextual features representing the key dimensions of any political system.

To get a more complete picture of the factors affecting citizen SWD, in this article we draw inspiration from and freely combine several conceptual frameworks from the comparative politics literature that have sought to break down the democratic process into its key components. We notably adapt Mazzuca's 'access to' and 'exercise of' power dichotomy as well as Munck's threefold framework distinguishing 'access to government offices' and 'government-decision-making' from the 'implementation of government decisions.' Such broad categorizations echo the classic models of regime support stemming from David Easton's systemic analysis of political processes: the input-oriented model, which is focused on participation in the democratic process, and the output-oriented model, which emphasizes the importance of government performance. These models are enriched with a third component, namely the procedures of government, that are deemed equally important for the legitimacy of democratic systems. Accordingly, we build our empirical analysis on three distinct components of democracies developed from three questions: (One) Who makes the decisions?, (Two) How are decisions made?, and (Three) What are the consequences of these decisions?