What Satisfaction with Democracy? A Global Analysis of “Satisfaction with Democracy” Measures

Abstract

Asking citizens “the way democracy works” is the basis of a wide literature on the support citizens have for their political institutions and is one of the most common survey items in political science. Moreover, it is a key indicator for the purported global decline in legitimacy. Yet, its trends, levels, and dynamics are still debated, and conclusions may be erroneous. In this paper, we compile a unique global dataset between 1973 and 2018 encompassing all major cross-national datasets and national election studies in twelve countries to study the dynamics and consistency of “satisfaction with democracy” (SWD) measures globally. Our results show that while trends and between-country differences in democratic satisfaction are largely similar, the levels of satisfaction vary substantially between survey projects, and both trends and levels vary significantly in several widely studied countries. We show that this has consequences at the individual level: opting for one survey over another may alter our conclusions about the relationship between key demographics and SWD. Thus, researchers studying SWD should endeavor to consult diverse survey sources and should be cautious about their conclusions when they do not, especially when it comes to making claims about changes in SWD over time.

Satisfaction with Democracy: The Impact of Institutions, Contexts and Attitudes

“…We agree with recent interventions that argue SWD should be interpreted as measuring a concept between these two extremes (Valgarðsson and Devine, 2022; Norris, 2011). In mature democracies, SWD is not a measure of preference for democracy as against other forms of government, since in nearly all these countries over 90 per cent of citizens think that democracy is best, yet aggregate SWD varies from about 40 per cent to 90 per cent.…”

Combining multiple survey sources: A reproducible workflow and toolbox for survey data harmonization

“…Rescaled averages of responses to the trust question with the 10-point scale in EB tend to be lower (and close to means from the 10-point EQLS scale) than those from the usual binary scale. For a more thorough analysis of scale and project effect with regard to political support, see, for example, Valgarðsson and Devine (2021).…”

“…One such challenge emerges in the harmonization of ordinal rating scales of different lengths, as in the trust example, where different mapping approaches are possible. In one approach, the target scheme would be the simplest one, that is, a binary scale, and longer response scales in the source data are dichotomized (the midpoints in scales with odd number of points can be either collapsed with one of the two target categories, or discarded as missing data; for an example of the latter application see Valgarðsson and Devine, 2021). Another approach involves rescaling to a common range while keeping all the interim values.…”

A Crisis of Political Trust? Global trends in institutional trust from 1958 to 2019

“…While increasing trust in implementing institutions is likely to be generally considered a positive development (seeTyler 2001), it seems to us worrisome from a democratic perspective that citizens are growing more trusting of non-representative institutions at the same time as they have grown less trusting of representative institutions, as this might pave the way for nondemocratic political leaders to use the state in more autocratic ways. Other studies have demonstrated that people's support for democratic ideals(Claassen 2019b;Dalton 2004;Stoker 2017) and their 'satisfaction with the way democracy works'(Claassen and Magalhães 2022;Valgarðsson and Devine 2021) remain steady at high levels, but eroding trust in the institutional mechanisms intended to bring democracy about may nevertheless directly or indirectly threaten the future of democratic governance (e.g Easton 1965;Hetherington 2005)…”