Satisfaction With Democracy: When Government by the People Brings Electoral Losers and Winners Together

• Author: Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen,Lucas Leemann
• DOI: 10.1177/00104140211024302
• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Date: 01 January 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2022, Vol. 55(1) 93–121

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140211024302

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Satisfaction With

Democracy: When

Government by the

People Brings Electoral

Losers and Winners

Together

Lucas Leemann

1

and Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen

2

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed the rise of populist parties and a number of

actors that question liberal democracy. Many explanations of this rely on

dissatisfied citizens. We ask in this article whether and how institutions al-

lowing citizens to participate in policy-making affect differences in democratic

satisfaction within varying representative contexts as well as between elec-

toral winners and losers. To do so, we first develop a measure of sub-national

direct democracy and then use it together with extensive survey data to

investigate how direct democracy is associated with citizens’evaluation of

their democratic system. We conclude that direct democracy is not generally

related to more satisfied people but rather closes the “satisfaction-gap”

between electoral winners and losers. In contrast to previous research, we

demonstrate that this mechanism holds across different representative

systems.

1

University Zurich, Switzerland

2

University of Bern, Switzerland

Corresponding Author:

Lucas Leemann, Department of Political Science, Universitat Zurich, Zurich 8006, Switzerland.

Email: leemann@ipz.uzh.ch

Keywords

elections, public opinion, and voting behavior, political psychology,

representation and electoral systems, sub-national politics

Recent decades have seen an intensified interest in democratic satisfaction.

Liberal democracy seemed to be the inevitable outcome of historic processes

and modernization (Fukuyama, 1989;Lipset, 1959). But the last decade and

the crystallization of political forces opposed to liberal democracy highlight

that liberal democracy is the only possible outcome. This fuels research on

how citizens evaluate the political system in which they live and how satisfied

they are with it (e.g. Esaiasson et al., 2020;Liberini et al., 2017;Norris, 2011).

The main challenge emerges from populist parties, which have been con-

sidered to be “an expression of dissatisfaction with existing modes of or-

ganized elite-mass political intermediation and the desire to abandon the

intermediaries that stand between citizens and rulers”(Kitschelt, 2002,

p. 179). In this study, we focus on institutions allowing for more citizen

involvement and whether they go along with higher levels of individual

satisfaction with democracy.

Direct democratic institutions receive special attention since they appear to

bridge the gap between (perhaps) naive ideals of individual engagement with

the res publica and a representative system. This is not a new phenomenon and

can actually be traced back to the early days of representative democracy.

After the French revolution, the ass´

emble nationale had to draft a constitution.

One faction, the Girondist to whom Condorcet belonged, proposed a draft that

entailed a number of direct democratic elements but it was ultimately rejected

(K¨

olz, 2004). Ever since, direct democracy has been proposed as a remedy to

felt deficiencies of representative democracies. Whether direct democracy

empirically succeeds in overcoming these perceived deficiencies and whether

it has negative externalities are other questions.

This is reflected in both public discourse

1

and in academic research (Freitag

& Stadelmann-Steffen, 2010;Frey, 1994;Frey and Stutzer, 2000,2010;

Gerber, 1999;Heidbreder et al., 2019;Leemann & Wasserfallen, 2016;

Matsusaka, 2005;2010;Stadelmann-Steffen & Vatter, 2012;Stutzer & Frey,

2003;Smith and Tolbert, 2004;Webb, et al., 2019). Hug (2009) explicitly

called for a study on how direct democratic institutions interact with elements

of the representative system. At times when democracy is not the only game in

town anymore, it is even more relevant to know more about whether direct

democratic institutions affect (dis)satisfaction with the representative political

system and how this depends on the structure of the representative system.

This is the starting point of this study, in which we delve deeper into the

association between direct democracy and individual satisfaction using a

94 Comparative Political Studies 55(1)