Economic Evaluations, Procedural Fairness, and Satisfaction with Democracy

Abstract

Although public support for political authorities, institutions, and even regimes is affected by the delivery of positive economic outcomes, we know that judgments on authorities are also made on the basis of several other aspects that fall into the general theme of “procedural fairness.” So far, most of the literature examining satisfaction with democracy has, from this point of view, focused on the direct effects of both economic and procedural fairness indicators or evaluations. This study takes as its starting point a large number of studies in social psychology showing that procedural fairness moderates the effects of outcome favorability in the explanation of citizens’ reactions to authorities. It expands those findings to the macro-political level, using representative samples of European populations in twenty-nine countries. It reveals that the general depiction of satisfaction with the way democracies work in practice as a fundamentally “performance-driven attitude” needs to qualified: economic evaluations matter, but they do not matter in the same way in all contexts and for all people, with procedural fairness playing a relevant moderating role in this respect.

The costs of electoral fraud: establishing the link between electoral integrity, winning an election, and satisfaction with democracy

“…Blais 2000; Franklin 2002, 2004; Jackman and Miller 1995; Karp and Banducci 2008; Norris 2004, 2014), and are affected by perceptions of procedural fairness (e.g. Dahlberg and Holmberg 2013; Gilley 2006; Magalhães 2016; Rothstein and Teorell 2008). With regard to the conduct of elections, Birch (2010) and Norris (2014) echo earlier contributions on Latin America and Africa (Alemika 2007; Bratton 1998; Bratton and van de Walle 1997; McCann and Domínguez 1998): Citizens who perceive elections to be fair are more likely to vote than those who have reservations about electoral procedures.…”

Losers lose more than winners win: Asymmetrical effects of winning and losing in elections

“…They show that these participatory elements affect losers much more than they affect winners, and this makes the authors speculate that there are probably other mechanisms at play in explaining why proportional democracies produce smaller gaps between winners’ and losers’ satisfaction with democracy. Magalhães () extends this literature by showing that voters’ perception of the fairness of procedures has important implications for voters’ satisfaction with democracy. He reaches this result after controlling for the voters’ distance to the incumbents, which we take to (indirectly) reflect loser status.…”

Transparency, Policy Outcomes, and Incumbent Support

“…Evidence explicitly testing this process‐outcome interaction in the study of support for political authorities is not particularly abundant, but it is growing. Magalhães ( and ) shows how “satisfaction with democracy” at the national level is less driven by perceptions of economic improvements — either individually perceived or objectively assessed — under conditions of high procedural fairness. Rhodes‐Purdy () shows that the relationship between regime performance and regime support are moderated by subjective evaluations of procedures.…”