Satisfaction with Democracy and the Winner/Loser Debate: The Role of Policy Preferences and Past Experience

Abstract

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.

Ideological Congruence and Citizen Satisfaction: Evidence From 25 Advanced Democracies

“…These findings echo the results of other recent studies (Curini et al, 2012), including a number of pieces that use different measures of egocentric congruence. Kim (2009), for example, finds that citizen satisfaction rises, the closer an individual is ideologically to the median party in parliament.…”

“…The results pertaining to the direct effects of egocentric congruence corroborate and extend the approach taken by a small but growing number of published pieces that use similar (Curini et al 2012) It is also worth re-iterating that the relationship between egocentric congruence and citizen satisfaction withstands the inclusion of the control variable of being a national electoral winner. Given their conceptual similarities, there is good reason to believe that this variable, which has repeatedly been found to boost citizen satisfaction, would have swamped the individual-level effects of ideological congruence.…”

“…Before delving into the results of the multilevel models, we first present straightforward macro-level evidence on the general relationship between sociotropic congruence and 12 Anderson et al, 2005;Anderson and Guillory, 1997;Anderson and Tverdova, 2001;Anderson and LoTempio, 2002;Anderson and Mendes, 2006;Banducci and Karp, 2003;Blais and Gélineau, 2007;Curini et al 2012;Moehler, 2009;Singh 2013;Singh et al 2012. 13 Descriptive statistics for the variables included in our analyses can be found in the appendix, Table A2.…”

“…Given their conceptual similarities, there is good reason to believe that this variable, which has repeatedly been found to boost citizen satisfaction, would have swamped the individual-level effects of ideological congruence. That said, existing research has produced mixed results on this expectation (Curini et al 2012;Dahlberg and Holmberg 2014;Kim 2009). Given the different measures of egocentric congruence we employed, coupled with the broad temporal and geographic coverage of our data, our findings advance this line of research by providing solid evidence that ideological distance from both government and legislature does indeed matter for individual voters above and beyond having their preferred party sit in government.…”

“…This idea that egocentric congruence might be positively related to citizen satisfaction has already found some empirical support (Brandenburg and Johns 2014;Kim 2009;Dahlberg and Holmberg 2014;Curini et al 2012; though for a contrary view see Singh et al 2011). …”