Voters’ satisfaction with the political system is tied to how well those voters’ preferred parties perform in elections. Curini, Jou, and Memoli (2012) have recently shown that political satisfaction can be mediated by previous political success e.g. short term losers (those who support losing parties) will be more satisfied with democracy than long term losers, while winners/losers who are closer ideologically to the winning party or candidate are generally more satisfied with the political system than winners/losers who are ideologically further away. We build on this extant literature to consider voter satisfaction with democracy from the performance-related perspective of valence. Using the Mannheim Eurobarometer trend file and data on parties’ character-based valence, we find that long-term losers are only responsive to the valence-related performance of opposition parties, while short- and long-term winners are responsive to the conditional performance of governing parties.
