Government effectiveness and support for democracy

Abstract

Diffuse support for democracy, as captured in mass surveys, tends to be treated as impervious to regime performance. Such a finding is often presented as confirmation of the basic distinction between ‘diffuse’ and ‘specific’ support as proposed by David Easton. This study argues that this line of argument stems from an incomplete reading of important aspects of Easton's theorisation about the relationship between system outputs and diffuse support. Using multilevel models, evidence from more than 100 surveys in close to 80 countries, and different measures of democratic support, it is shown that government effectiveness is the strongest macro‐level predictor of such support. In democratic regimes, government effectiveness, understood as the quality of policy‐making formulation and implementation, is linked to higher levels of support for democracy. Furthermore, in non‐democracies, effectiveness and support for democracy are, under some model specifications, negatively related.

Economic Crisis and Support for Democracy in Europe

“…The contribution of the paper is twofold. Firstly, we show that both specific and diffuse support can be affected by the perceived performance of the economy (Magalhães 2014c). Thus, the short-term experience has a relevant effect in terms of how citizens express not only their satisfaction, but, contrary to Huang et al (2008), also their attachment to democracy itself.…”

“…' This article wants to challenge this idea by analysing how the current economic crisis has affected satisfaction with the political system (specific support) and the attachment to democracy as a regime (diffuse support; see Easton 1975;Mattes and Bratton 2007 for a review). Despite the fact that some scholars have shown that levels of satisfaction with the way democracy works dramatically declined across Europe during the last recession (Armingeon and Guthmann 2013), to our knowledge, there is no empirical evidence about its effects on support for democracy as a core value or how it relates to short-term economic shocks (Magalhães 2014c).…”

When and where did the great recession erode the support of democracy?

“…More misery often implies more dissatisfaction which may (ultimately) affect legitimacy. Many researchers have shown that people in democratic regimes tend to support democracy when governmental performance is good (Magalhães 2014;Keman 2014). The core argument is that discontent with the way the regime works and/or its policy outcomes erodes the citizens' support of it (Pharr and Putnam 2000).…”

The Importance of Electoral and Judicial Trust for Regime Support

“…We have chosen to apply two related but differently operationalized versions of QoG. One is the Government Effectiveness Index developed by the World Bank (Kaufmann 2004, Kaufmann et al 2010, Magalhaes 2013. The other is an Impartial Public Service (IPS) index designed within the Quality of Government Institute (Rothstein andTeorell 2012, Dahlström, Lapuente and.…”