Patterns of democratic institutions and citizens’ attachment to democracy

The second decade of the twenty-first century is witnessing a renewed tide of public discontent with democracy around much of Europe. While most of the recent literature on this topic has granted a crucial role to indicators such as the economic performance of governments and the quality of the representative institutions, in this paper I will hold a different account. Citizens care as much about the economic results and/or how they are treated by their representative governments as they worry about the outputs of the democratic system. The paper proposes to explore the outcomes democracy produces in in four areas of democracy: freedom, political equality, representation, and social justice. The extent to which democracies are more or less politically egalitarian -in terms of the extension of the nationality and voting rights-; more or less free in terms of how much popular control over the political system is allowed by the institutions; more or less representative according to how they represent the different interests in society; and more or less socially equal in terms of how extensive the welfare state is, creates different models of democratic systems which affect the way in which citizens think of and behave democratically. These four democratic principles are institutionalized in the political system through different institutional settings such as the citizenship laws, the use of electoral quotas for women and minority groups, the quality (transparency and meritocracy) of the bureaucratic system, the fractionalization of the electoral system, the ballot structure, and the type and extension of the welfare state. Thus, the main contribution of the paper is to propose an original macrotheoretical framework of democratic institutions for understanding cross-national variation in diverse behavioural and attitudinal reactions of citizens toward democracy. The model identifies some of the dimensions of political institutions that, according to previous literature, are closely related to important aspects of political behaviour and democratic attitudes and puts them together in a single theoretical approach of how democracy matters for citizens. The paper builds on and contributes to the literature of the contextual effects (of institutions) on comparative democratic attitudes and behaviour, challenging the conventional wisdom that only the economy and/or the representative institutions (electoral and party systems) may have an influence over citizens. At the individual level, the data come from the 6th wave of the European Social Survey (ESS). At the macro level the data are taken from different sources such as the Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem), the Democracy Barometer, and the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), among others.