Previous authors have found greater political support among electoral winners than losers, but they define winners and losers at a single time point, and employ a dichotomous categorization that neglects possible variations within each group. This study considers both the past history of winning or losing and the impact of ideological distance from the government on a political support indicatorsatisfaction with democracy. Using a multilevel model covering thirty-one countries, the authors show that the relationship between winner/loser status and satisfaction with democracy has a marginal dynamic nature and a policy content. Among present losers, previous experience of victory assuaged dissatisfaction, while among those presenting a consolidated 'winning' record, only high ideological proximity to the current government boosted political support.As a mechanism ensuring accountability of the governors to the governed, elections constitute one of the defining features of democracy. Election results shape government composition and policy outputs, most likely to the advantage of voters who support the winning parties. Previous studies have addressed the gap between electoral winners and losers on various dimensions of political support, from specific institutional evaluations to more diffuse aspects concerning democratic principles and procedures, 1 and found that winners express significantly greater support than losers at each level. However, these works define winners and losers in a static fashion by examining their attitudes at only a single time-point, and employ a dichotomous categorization that does not capture possible variations within each group. In this study, we take into consideration both the past history of winning or losing on present attitudes, and the impact of ideological distance from the government on a commonly used indicator of political support, namely satisfaction with democracy.

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The established view in political science is that a sound and functioning state has to be in place before democracy can be introduced. State first, and then democracy. While acknowledging the existence of a basic state infrastructure as a necessary starting point, we examine the possibility that democratization itself may play an important role in the subsequent development and consolidation of the state. We do this by addressing the major conceptual and methodological shortcomings of existing research on this topic. The results of our panel analysis, covering a population of 122 countries, show that both a country's level of democracy and the interaction between degree and duration of democracy positively and significantly affect the consolidation of the state and of its two key individual dimensions, namely, political order and administrative capacity.

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The article presents a large-scale analysis of party attitudes toward the EU with a specific focus on Euroscepticism. We first compare the attitudes of radical parties to those of mainstream parties in order to assess their differences with regard to many specific aspects of the EU process. Then, we show that extreme left and extreme right express rather distinctive views when moving from broad Eurosceptical stances to more specific preferences on the integration process. Finally, we highlight significant differences in party attitudes toward the EU across countries, particularly between the old and the new member states.

Several scholars investigate the link between news media and political attitudes of citizens, showing that media exposure affects confidence in political institutions. Beginning from this perspective, we analyze trust in government in twenty-seven European countries, testing the interactive relationship between citizens’ policy views and media slant. Under the assumption that news media bias content in the direction of their audiences or are compliant with potential influence exerted by the government, we use Eurobarometer survey data to measure the effects of the ideological slant of newspapers and public television on trust in government. Our results show that the pro- or antigovernment slant of media outlets interacts with the individual ideological views of each citizen and confirm that media act like “echo-chambers” that reinforce preexisting attitudes. Conversely, the consumption of counter-attitudinal information barely alters trust in government nor does it produce hostile media effects. We also find a slight difference between newspaper readers and public service broadcaster (PSB) users, which seems related to mechanisms of cognitive dissonance.

Existing literature has analysed the relationship between electoral systems and either corruption or satisfaction with democracy (SWD) focussing on the traditional distinction between majoritarian and proportional systems. This paper, instead, investigates if and how specific aspects of electoral systems moderate the negative effects of corruption perceptions on SWD. We argue that two mechanisms act simultaneously but at different levels. The first mechanism is the relationship between voters and the national government, while the second links single representatives to their constituents. We advance conditional hypotheses that postulate an attenuating effect of disproportionality and a reinforcing impact of personal vote. Empirical results from 35 elections in 33 democracies, using both individual and aggregate-level data, confirm the research hypotheses. More disproportional electoral systems weaken the impact of citizens’ perceived corruption on their democratic satisfaction, while this is strengthened by systems in which the ballot control is mostly in the hand of the voters.