The legislators’ constituency orientation and citizens’ satisfaction with democracy. Results from a 4-country conjoint experiment

Prior research sheds light on factors that citizens take into account when they evaluate democratic quality. Various indicators of government and party performance are shown to matter indicating that the output of the political system promotes democratic stability and legitimacy on the long run. This study contributes to the literature by arguing that the legislators’ constituency orientation affects citizens’ satisfaction with democracy. To test the hypothesis of the paper we conduct a conjoint experiment in four countries with markedly different electoral systems: Belgium, France, Italy and Hungary. Conjoint experiments, as a form of survey experiments, are useful in identifying and estimating multiple causal effects nonparametically. The effects of the various attributes can be directly compared, which allows the researcher to test several hypotheses at the same time. Besides testing the effect of constituency orientation, the paper compares this effect to that of economic prosperity, the proportionality of the electoral results, the candidate-centredness of the electoral rules, government ideology, government coalition, minority government, government corruption and party system fragmentation. While the study focuses on macro-level explanations of satisfaction, the analysis further controls for the citizen-level usual suspects in explaining democratic satisfaction.