2023/01/04 by Fred Cutler, Andrea Nuesser, Benjamin Nyblade
Social Sciences · #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Social Capital and Networks #Social Media and Politics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0008423922000853
Abstract We propose a new, unified approach for comparative research on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD). It starts with a well-specified individual-level model of the considerations citizens draw upon when answering the SWD survey question. Then we specify the relationship from contextual factors (especially institutions) through these individual-level mediating considerations and on to the SWD attitude. Multilevel structural equation estimation is applied to a merged dataset of European Social Survey (ESS) and country-level contextual data. The results add solidity to theoretical and empirical findings that citizens’ judgments of democracy are driven mostly by policy outputs and lived experience and not much by institutional variation or its political consequences.