Critical or Disaffected? Assessing Citizens’ Support for Democracy

Citizens have quite paradoxical views of democracy: While democratic norms enjoy broad popular support, there is considerable dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy. Yet, the normative implications of democratic discontent remain a puzzle: On the one hand, it is often claimed that citizens are increasingly alienated from democracy and its representatives, which compromises the legitimacy of the system as a whole. On the other hand, scholars have argued that ‘critical citizens’ are actually a benefit for democratic regimes, as they push for more participation and inclusion. In this paper, I contend that we need to analyze the causes of dissatisfaction more carefully if we want to consider its normative dimensions. To do so, I apply the concept of 'congruence': If a citizens’ expectations from democracy are consistent with the evaluations of his or her own democracy, satisfaction should increase. Hence, this paper tackles the workshop’s question of assessing the ‘gap’ between citizens’ democratic perceptions and desires. Precisely, I argue that only if citizens’ attitudes are congruent and dissatisfaction is a product of high expectations and low(er) evaluations, discontent can be seen as positive for a democracy. If dissatisfaction is not related to expectations and evaluations, it is a threat to democratic legitimacy, as it means that the causes of dissatisfaction are beyond the reach of actual democratic improvement. Using data for 29 countries from the European Social Survey 6, I empirically assess the competing claims made in the literature by applying structural equation modeling. In fact, sources of discontent vary considerably across countries, and different dimensions of democracy diverge in their relevance for dissatisfaction. Importantly, only a part of dissatisfied citizens hold congruent attitudes and can actually be labeled as ‘critical’. Especially lower educated citizens, however, are not congruent in their attitudes and should thus rather be classified as ‘disaffected’.