Underrepresentation and democratic dissatisfaction, an unexplored link?

In recent decades, a growing body of scholarship has shed light on the persistent inequalities in political representation, revealing that citizens are far from equal in their access to and experience of representation. Despite extensive research on substantive under-representation, fewer research focus on the consequences of descriptive and substantive representation on democratic dissatisfaction. Research focussing on this link literature tends to find a significant relationship between substantive underrepresentation and democratic dissatisfaction , however very few tackle measurement sensitivity. This study aims to make a significant contribution to the existing literature on both satisfaction with democracy and political representation by investigating the relationship between substantive representation with different institutions (distinguishing between parliament and government) and satisfaction with democracy. Using the 10 waves of the ESS data on multiples country and elections, our results demonstrate that institutions matter. More specifically, we show that congruence with the government is the key determinant of satisfaction with democracy. In contrast to this intuitive result, we also show that congruence with the parliament is negatively correlated with democratic satisfaction. The findings reveal an interesting puzzle regarding different measures of substantive representation, highlighting the need for a critical review and further investigation in future studies.