Dissatisfied and Alienated: Does Good Governance Matters to Them?

In time of growing populism, political dissatisfaction and alienation it seems that identity politics and cultural wars (Berman 2016; Fukuyama 2018) are dominant forces that shape the political competition. We have general knowledge that more educated urban voters are less inclined to support populist parties and are less politically alienated and dissatisfied. The dominance of socio-economic status in explaining political attitudes of citizens is obvious from many statistical analysis since the famous study of Almond and Verba (1963). However, the macro contextual factors are less probed, especially in countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEEs). This region has experienced the rise of populist politicians but conversely to most of the Western states, those were the leaders of traditional central-right parties such as Fidesz in Hungary or PiS in Poland (of course in some countries the new populist movements has emerged as well). Not all the CEE countries have experienced the populist tide. Some countries scores high on many quality of governance performance and are governed by parties that are not labelled as populist movements. The crucial question is what, if any, is there an effect of good governance performance on the political attitudes of citizens. The aim of the paper is to investigate the effect of varying governance performance on citizens’ attitudes across the CEE countries. The dependent variable are the classic concept of political dissatisfaction and its dimension (see Christensen 2015). The governance performance as contextual factor is measured by hard performance indices (Governance Matters of World Bank and other organisations). First, we test if the government performance objective hard measures are correlated with subjective individual survey level measures of governance performance (QoG index of Göteborg University etc.). The differences are than regressed on set of country level predictors. Secondly, we use a hierarchical level regression models to control for SES of the respondents and other individual characteristics that generally affects the political attitudes on the first level to probe the effect of contextual country factors (governance performance) on the second level (controlling for several other country level contextual factors such as the social capital, government fragmentation, government turnover, type of coalition government etc.). This complex research design allows us to determine the effect of contextual factors and probe cross level interactions between contextual and individual variables. We hypothesize that the effect of good governance might be conditioned by other individual and contextual factors. Especially we would like to investigate, if there are differences between countries that are governed by political parties that has politically alienated electorate, low SES voters and which base is mostly in disadvantaged peripheral regions of the country.