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ABSTRACT
The question of whether European democracy is in crisis is not new, but is posed in a new way in the shadow of the euro crisis. In the tradition of the studies of democratic support and disaffection and based on data from the European Social Survey 2012, this article analyses the conceptions and evaluations of democracy in the different regions of Europe under the impact of the euro crisis. It shows that the perceived poor performance of the economy and of the government in the crisis, indeed, leads citizens across Europe to evaluate the way their national democracy works more critically – especially in the hard hit regions of Central and Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, and in authoritarian countries. However, it also shows that this critical evaluation of democracy does not undermine the citizens’ support for democracy. Quite to the contrary: democratic principles are actually strengthened by the dissatisfaction of the citizens with the economic and political performance of their countries in the crisis.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Hanspeter Kriesi is the Stein Rokkan Chair of Comparative Politics at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, Florence.
Notes
1 This indicator has been heavily criticized in the literature. Ferrín (Citation2016: 306) has submitted this indicator to a detailed test. The good news of her test is that ‘SWD seems to provide a relatively reliable measure of citizens’ perceptions of how well the liberal dimension of democracy works in their country.’ For our purposes, it is suboptimal that the Eurobarometer data which I use here are rather incomplete. Thus, there are no data for the important period between autumn 2007 and autumn 2011.
2 The 29 countries include 12 NWE countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland, the Nordic countries [Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland], Ireland, and the United Kingdom), five SE countries (Italy, Portugal and Spain, Cyprus, and neighbouring Israel), and 12 CEE countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, and neighbouring Albania, Kosovo, Russia, and Ukraine).
3 The importance questions used the formulation ‘How important is [x] for democracy in general’ and the responses were measured using an 11-point scale labelled as ‘Not at all important for democracy in general (0) – Extremely important for democracy in general (10)’.
4 The evaluation questions used the following formulation: ‘Please tell me to what extent you think each of the following statements applies in [country]. 0 means you think the statement does not apply at all and 10 means you think it applies completely.’
5 Table A1 in the Online Appendix provides an overview over all the items used for the three models in this contribution.
6 Both items were asked in the same format as the liberal democracy items in the rotating module.
7 See Kriesi et al. Citation2016: 74 fn9.
8 The satisfaction with the government is based on the following question: ‘Now thinking about the [country] government, how satisfied are you with the way it is doing its job?’ And satisfaction with life is based on this question: ‘Now all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays?’ Responses are also recorded on a 0–10 scale.
9 The indicator for satisfaction with the electoral outcome, i.e., the indicator for electoral winners, is based on the party voted for in the last elections or, if not voted in the last election, the party one feels close at the time of the interview.
10 This battery includes parliament, the legal system, the policy, politicians, and political parties. The five items form a strong factor.
11 Assuming uncorrelated residuals, the calculation of indirect effects is straightforward (see Duncan Citation1975): one just multiplies the regression coefficients along corresponding causal paths. The SEM-procedure provides the estimates for total effects as well as their standard errors.
12 This may be owing to the different measures we use for the support of democratic principles. At the end of his paper, Magalhães (Citation2014: 93) himself criticizes the existing survey measures of regime support and pleads for better measures. In my view, the measures provided by the ESS clearly improve on the existing measures.
13 This figure and the following figure are based on Table A3 in the Online Appendix.