Exploring the Link between the Ideological Composition of Government and Citizens’ Satisfaction with Democracy

Research has widely shown that citizens’ appreciation of European democracies seems to be worsening. This alarming finding has generated a debate among scholars, but an agreement on the causes and effects of this discontent is far from being reached. The contrasting results can be partly explained by the different interpretations and determinants at work to make sense of the main variable that measures the abovementioned appreciation: satisfaction with democracy. Satisfaction with democracy is a complex and therefore contested concept. It has been argued that “satisfaction with the way democracy works is not an indicator of system legitimacy per se” (Linde & Ekman 2003) and that instead, satisfaction with democracy is a way of evaluating democracy in a very practical environment (Wagner, Schneider, & Halla, 2009). Still, what exactly satisfaction with democracy is and which dimensions it entails is still up for discussion. So far the literature has mainly focused on four dimensions: (1) the electoral dimension; (2) the institutional dimension; (3) the representative dimension; and (4) the external dimension. In this paper we aim at further investigating what satisfaction with democracy is by inspecting its relationship with the ideological positioning of voters and the government in office. We argue that, due to the complexity of the concept of democracy, citizens are likely to be more satisfied with the democracy in their own country if they have a close relationship with the government in office. Therefore, citizens that live in a country where the government in office has the same ideological positioning (left or right) as them are going to be more satisfied with democracy. In order to carry out this study we built a unique dataset by harmonizing the Eurobarometers and the ParlGov data (2004-2014, for all European Countries). The Eurobarometer contains the satisfaction with democracy variable and the individual left/right self-positioning, along with control variables (such as trust in government, trust in Parliament, economic evaluation of individual and country situation, etc), whilst the ParlGov data provides the left-right positioning of government per country and per year.