Do political institutions affect citizen satisfaction with democracy? If so, how? Using cross-sectional survey data for eleven European democracies together with data on the type of democracy in which individuals live, we demonstrate that the nature of representative democratic institutions (measured by Arend Lijphart's consensus-majority index of democracies) mediates the relationship between a person's status as part of the political minority or majority and his or her satisfaction with the way the system works. Specifically, we find that (1) the losers of democratic competition show lower levels of satisfaction than do those in the majority and (2) losers in systems that are more consensual display higher levels of satisfaction with the way democracy works than do losers in systems with majoritarian characteristics. Conversely, winners tend to be more satisfied with democracy the more a country's political institutions approximate pure majoritarian government.

Using surveys conducted in sixteen mature and newly established democracies around the globe, this study examines the effect of corruption on people's attitudes toward government. The analysis demonstrates that citizens in countries with higher levels of corruption express more negative evaluations of the performance of the political system and exhibit lower levels of trust in civil servants. However, the results also show that the negative effect of corruption on evaluations of the political system is significantly attenuated among supporters of the incumbent political authorities. These findings provide strong and systematic evidence that informal political practices, especially those that compromise important democratic principles, should be considered important indicators of political system performance. Moreover, they imply that, while corruption is a powerful determinant of political support across widely varying political, cultural, and economic contexts, it does not uniformly diminish support for political institutions across all segments of the electorate.

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Abstract. This article examines a model of the domestic political economy of subjective employment insecurity in advanced industrial societies. Based on data on people's attitudes toward their job as well as levels of and kinds of social protection collected in 15 OECD countries, it shows that there are distinct manifestations of job insecurity that are affected differently by distinct aspects of social protection programs. While the analysis shows that social protection measures reduce employment insecurity, it also reveals that overall levels welfare state generosity do not have any systematic effect on whether workers feel secure. The article's findings suggest the need to decompose the different components of employment insecurity as well as disaggregate national systems of social protection when examining the impact of welfare states on job insecurity.Comparative political economists commonly assume that increased economic insecurity is one of the prime explanations for why welfare states have continued to grow, or why cutbacks have been relatively limited, despite tax fatigue and the economic pressures associated with globalization. Following Rodrik (1997) and Garrett (1998), much of the existing literature takes as axiomatic that insecurity, measured objectively, generates demand for social protection. Given the centrality that such reasoning has come to assume, the absence of any systematic analysis of the effects of social protection on individual perceptions of economic insecurity is striking. Drawing on 1997 survey data from 15 OECD countries, the following analysis focuses on whether and how cross-national differences in social protection affect the extent to which workers worry about losing their jobs.In estimating the effects of public policy and institutional arrangements, we draw on research in psychology to distinguish between different components of job insecurity, and explore how specific types of social protection (employment protection legislation, active labor market policies and unemployment insurance) affect these components. By disaggregating both job insecurity and systems of social protection, our analysis not only demonstrates that public provision of social protection does indeed reduce the job insecurity experienced by individuals, but also specifies the distinct causal pathways whereby this effect occurs.

The predominant normative justification for research on economic voting has been its essential role in shaping democratic accountability. A systematic examination of this literature reveals, however, that economic voting is highly contingent on two critical moderating factors: voters themselves and the political context in which they make judgments. The trend toward a better and more realistic understanding of economic voting produced by almost four decades of empirical research has created what I label "contingency dilemmas" for the field's normative foundations because economic voting does not function as envisioned by advocates of democratic accountability. This essay reviews these empirical findings and critically examines how they affect the economic voting paradigm. It argues that, when viewed from a normative perspective, contingent accountability is clearly problematic, and it calls for a reconsideration of the normative underpinnings of the economic voting paradigm in light of the current state of knowledge.