Fair Elections, Representation, and the win-loss Satisfaction with Democracy gap

ABSTRACT

A substantial literature on public democratic satisfaction argues that system satisfaction is based on how the election transpires and the policy outcomes citizens anticipate from the electoral results. In a functioning democracy, citizens elect a government in fair elections and the election outcomes reflect the electorate’s views. Winners of both national and regional elections are regularly found to be more satisfied with their democracy than losers. This study shows that the perceived fairness and representativeness of the electoral results moderate this disparity by narrowing the satisfaction gap between electoral winners and electoral losers; this effect is concentrated in the evaluation of national elections. While respondents are more satisfied with their national and regional democracies when they run free and fair elections, perceived electoral fairness and outcome representativeness only moderate electoral outcomes’ effects at the national level. By manipulating the public’s reserve of democratic satisfaction, public perception of the elections’ fairness and responsiveness can undermine or support democratic opinion.

KEYWORDS:

• Elections
• public opinion
• satisfaction with democracy
• representation

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A smaller win-loss satisfaction gap in the older and high-quality democracies in the Making Electoral Democracy Work dataset works against finding effects.

2 The dataset includes EU and municipal elections, but they are not used in the analysis. Switzerland is not included because of the power-sharing structure of the government in this period.

3 Multilevel correlations are estimated with the ‘correlation’ package (Makowski et al., 2022). The level is the survey group (election ID).

4 Abstainers are included because ‘[o]mitting non-voters misrepresents the citizenry’s attitudes towards democracy by omitting the least satisfied citizens and skews the understanding of how citizen characteristics and political experience relate to support for democracy’ (Ridge, 2022b, p. 890). Abstainers can be less satisfied with their democracy (Blais & Gélineau, 2007) and less politically and socially trusting than voters (Allen, 2017). They could be particularly sensitive to subjective evaluations of the democratic system, including in their choice to participate (Blais & Gélineau, 2007; Bruter & Harrison, 2017). Thus, including them more reliably considers the popular opinion in these countries.

5 Multilevel models are not used because there are too few clusters.

6 Intriguingly, the country’s polyarchy rating shows a negative relationship at the national level. The multilevel correlation of national democracy satisfaction and polyarchy is not significant. This could reflect the fact that all the countries were highly rated, leaving little variation on this point (0.70–0.83). It could also indicate that political scientists’ ratings of democracy and citizens’ ratings differ in some way or that a parabolic relationship exists between democratic quality and citizen satisfaction at the highest level. Future research could examine these possibilities.

7 The models are replicated in Appendix B with the fairness and representative variables added as covariates respectively. The results are substantively similar. Both variables are not simultaneously interacted because the partial derivative of satisfaction with respect to electoral victory or defeat would include multiple coefficients, obscuring the effect of winning or losing the election on democratic satisfaction.

8 Largely, voters and abstainers did not regret their respective choices for or against participation, though voters were much more positive about it. 93.1% of voters said it was a fairly good or very good decision to have voted. Of abstainers, 46.3% said it was a very good or fairly good decision to abstain, and 27.6% declined to answer or did not know. This potential regret could permeate other attitudes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hannah M. Ridge

Hannah M. Ridge is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Chapman University. She studies public opinion on democracy and religion and politics. She earned her PhD in Political Science at Duke University.