What Kind of Democrats? Ideological and Generational Gaps in Forms of Support for Democracy in Southern Europe in the Aftermath of the Economic Crisis

The political consequences of the economic crisis in Europe have been multifaceted, including party system change, the decline of mainstream parties and the rise of challenger parties, as well as new patterns of political mobilization. These phenomena are often explored through a normative lens, as they are typically connected to broader questions concerning the impact of the economic crisis on the health of democratic systems, especially in the most economically hard-hit countries in the European periphery. One of the most direct ways to investigate the impact of the economic crisis on democracy is to look at changes in attitudes towards representative institutions, satisfaction with democracy, as well as fluctuations in diffuse support for democracy as a system of governance. Previous studies have found that even though confidence in political elites and representative institutions as well as satisfaction with democracy were in decline at the height of the economic crisis, at the same time diffuse or core democratic support remained high (Teixeira et al. 2014) or was even higher in countries that had experienced harsh conditionality attached to bailout-deals in relation to the rest of Europe (Cordero & Simón 2015). Explanations of both dissatisfaction with democracy and of core democratic support tend to typically focus on real or perceived economic outcomes, education, income, cognitive mobilization and post-material values, while partisanship has been repeatedly shown to correlate with satisfaction with democracy, depending on the composition of the incumbent government (Anderson and Guillory 1997). However, the mediating effects of individual-level factors such as ideology and period of early political socialization on the relationship between deteriorating economic conditions and democratic support remains underexplored. We argue that economic hardship can have differential effects on democratic support across different ideological and generational groups, especially in the (relatively) new democracies of Southern Europe with their distinct political legacies. Such differences can manifest both quantitatively (degree of support) and qualitatively (particular understandings of democracy). We explore these hypotheses by analysing fresh data from post-electoral studies in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece that include the Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP) core questionnaire and its items on democratic legitimacy and meanings of democracy.