It’s Nice to Know You’re Close at Hand: Representational Distances and Satisfaction With Democracy Across Europe

In a recent article, Michael Laver (2011) outlined theoretically ‘Why vote-seeking parties may make voters miserable’. Brandenburg and Johns (in press) show that this potential is realised in Britain. Convergence among the two major parties has increased the distance between the median voter and his or her nearest major party, and this ‘representational distance’ is negatively associated with democratic satisfaction even controlling for a wide range of other variables. However, Britain is of course an extreme case in the European context, a highly majoritarian system constraining choice in terms of both the number and the ideological dispersion of parties. In this article we use European Election Study data to extend the analysis across Europe and over time. Our first goal is to investigate whether the main finding – that those who feel distant from all the significant players are particularly dissatisfied with democracy – holds across the continent. Two additional goals are to identify the institutional or other factors that minimise representational distances, and to examine the extent to which the satisfaction effects of having a proximate party are dampened by that party’s long-term absence from government.