Do Citizens Expect Too Much from Democracy?

Political science literature points to a gap between citizens’ expectations towards democracy and their perception of democratic systems’ actual performance (Norris 2011; Flinders 2012). Yet there are few comparative studies attempting to identify the conceptual dimensions along which this gap has developed, estimate its size, and explore its causes. By analyzing data drawn from the “Europeans’ Understanding and Evaluation of Democracy” module of Round 6 of the European Social Survey , this paper attempts to gauge the distance separating the meanings that citizens attribute to democracy and their corresponding evaluations of its operation, in light of the models of democracy adopted in individual ESS countries. Firstly, the analysis will shed light on the different concepts of democracy that emerge from respondents’ answers. Secondly, and with greater emphasis, the focus will shift to the relationship between respondents’ concepts of democracy and their evaluation of the democratic system. Finally, the study will address the influence of this gap on public trust in political institutions. Data allow us to estimate the distance between respondents’ answers concerning, respectively, the meaning of democracy and the actual performance of the system to which they belong. This data is examined according to two distinct perspectives: the gap is considered a dependent variable, and its potential determinants are identified with a special emphasis on institutional and cultural factors; the same variables are considered as independent variables in order to ascertain their effect on citizens’ trust in democratic institutions.