A Neglected Driver for Repairing Democracy – Congruence Between Citizens’ Institutional Preferences and Institutions

Contemporary diagnoses of the malaise of representative democracy frequently point to declining political satisfaction and eroding trust. These developments have generated a wide range of proposed reforms, which mostly aim at repairing specific problems. Also, much of the scholarly debate had taken an isolated perspective on distinct reforms and their specific effects. As part of the systemic turn, efforts for as well as research on repairing democracy are increasingly taking a holistic perspective on how to improve democracy as a whole – rather than fixing eclectically. However, all of these efforts and studies have largely turned a blind eye to the demand side of democracy: whether reforms and innovations correspond to what citizens actually want is rarely taken into account. This paper challenges this one-sided perspective by advancing an argument for institutional congruence as a crucial dimension of Repairing Democracy. We argue that – and investigate whether - the alignment between citizens’ institutional preferences and their perceptions of the actual functioning of these institutions plays a role in shaping citizens' subjective well-being, in particular in regard to its political dimension. Drawing on survey data, the paper analyzes how (in-)congruence between preferred and perceived institutional arrangements—such as valuing free elections while perceiving electoral processes as unfree, or desiring referendums while assessing the degree of direct democratic opportunities as insufficient —affects political dimensions of citizens’ subjective well-being. For this purpose, we operationalize well-being in terms of citizens’ trust in key political actors and institutions, as well as their satisfaction with the political system, the economy, the health system, the judiciary, and life more generally. By investigating the correlations between the (mis-)match between citizens’ institutional preferences and their assessment of the functioning of these, the paper shows that institutional congruence is a key mechanism for repairing democracy. In several robustness checks, we examine reverse causalities, e.g. disentangling the effects of (negative) assessments of institutional functioning from the effects of institutional (in-)congruence. Our findings prove that institutional congruence influences the political dimension of subjective well-being significantly – and has the potential to repair representative democracy in a holistic way. The paper contributes to debates on repairing democracy conceptually, empirically and practically by introducing institutional congruence. Conceptually, it elaborates on institutional congruence as a potential driver for repairing democracy. Empirically, it provides novel findings on how to explain a crucial component for repairing democracy, i.e. the political dimension of subjective well-being. Practically, it helps to understand which reforms may reproduce the malaise of representative democracy or add to repairing democracy.