Partisanship, Time, and Satisfaction with Democracy

Partisanship, Time, and Satisfaction with Democracy Negative partisanship – affective repulsion from a political party in one’s electoral system – has been found to drive many political behaviors. Negative partisans are more likely to vote, join a protest, join a party, or sign a political petition (Caruana et al. 2015; Mayer 2017). This paper will consider negative partisans’ democratic attitudes. Affective polarization has been a source of concern as a threat to democratic norms and stability (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). While previous research has considered that positive partisans are more likely to be satisfied with their democracy than non-partisans (Aldrich et al. 2020) and negative partisans express lower satisfaction with democracy than those without such negative sentiments (Ridge 2020), this research has not incorporated the time element implied by affective polarization. As partisans have stronger emotional distinctions, the effect of these identities on their institutional satisfaction may grow as well. Using the extended timeframe of the Integrated Module Dataset from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), this paper examines whether positive and negative partisanship have become more influential on citizens’ democratic satisfaction over the last twenty-five years. It will also consider the magnitude of the political parties involved. Ridge’s (2020) findings based on the 3rd Module of the CSES included a distinction between negative partisanship of major or minor parties in the political system. It finds that negative partisans of major parties are substantially less likely to be satisfied with the functioning of their democracies; negative partisans of minor parties, however, were not less likely to be dissatisfied than non-partisans. In examining the cross-temporal effect of partisanship on satisfaction, this paper will consider whether individuals are positive or negative partisans of major or minor parties. The effect of polarization could again be concentrated among partisans of major political parties.