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The Role of Democratic Expectations in Support for Democracy

Comparative Politics
Democracy
Public Opinion
Irene Palacios
Maastricht Universiteit
Irene Palacios
Maastricht Universiteit

Abstract

For decades, scholars have tended to assume that those citizens who support democracy as an ideal form of government automatically endorse all its constitutive liberal values. However, recent literature has suggested that most citizens are not simply ‘democrats’ but ‘democrats with adjectives’ (Schedler and Sarsfield, 2007), i.e. individuals who ‘qualify’ the kind of support they profess for the abstract concept of democracy. Thus, individuals differentiate from each other not only in the support they give to democracy, but also in the degree of attachment to its different core liberal values. However, the traditional items used in the literature on ‘satisfaction with democracy’, ‘political trust’, and ‘democracy as the best form of government’ have been proved to face diverse validity and reliability problems (Canache et al. 2001; Linde and Ekman 2003), and tell us very little about how the citizens actually see and experience their democratic regimes. To overcome these problems, the sixth round of the European Social Survey (ESS-6, 2012) provides a set of survey items that taps into citizens’ views and evaluations of democracy’s different dimensions in a nuanced way, and allows comparison of these attitudes across a large range of countries in Europe (29). Using data from the ESS-6, the aim of this paper is to investigate the political implications of the differential support citizens attach to the core values of liberal democracy. The paper investigates the extent to which the expectations around the liberal democratic ideal work as a relevant predictor of a general syndrome of democratic dissatisfaction, here understood as support for populist parties and too harsh evaluations of democratic performance - even more negative than what the ‘objective’ reality suggest. More particularly, I analyse the effects of how strongly citizens endorse such democratic values on the fate of democracy and explore into the mediating role of good quality institutions for generating democratic support. Overall, the results demonstrate the potential of the category of ‘democratic expectations’ in explaining levels of support to the system and shed new light on the consequences of evaluations by different types of individuals for regime legitimacy: When criticism to democracy comes from poorly committed citizens, it seems quite likely that their attitudinal and behavioural reactions could entail a potential threat to the system.