In this paper we argue that citizens take into account the level of government´s political autonomy to implement particular policies when expressing their views on satisfaction with democracy (SWD) but, in order to do so, they need to perceive it. When citizens directly observe the external constraints that reduce their government´s autonomy, then variations in levels of regime legitimacy may no longer be about government performance, as widely argued by political economists, but about democratic choices. Our argument develops after comparing the existing scenarios in the European Union before and after the Great Recession. Citizens only began to perceive their own lack of choice to decide between policy alternatives when the sovereign debt crisis broke out in May 2010. We will test this hypothesis by analysing variations in the level of SWD using data from Eurobarometers between 2002 and 2014. We shall first provide qualitative evidence to illustrate our argument and then use a two-step difference-in-difference analysis that combines individual and aggregated data.
