Based on theories about party and electoral systems provided by Downs (1957), Anderson and Guillory (1997), and Duverger (1984), we examine the relationship between citizen satisfaction with democracy and the institutional context in which democratic participation takes place. Using a multi-level design that controls for both institutional-level and individual-level differences, we find that as the number of political parties increases. citizen satisfaction with democracy first decreases and then increases. This result holdr regardless of whether or not one supported the ruling government in the previous election, undermining previous research that contendr that "winner" or "loser" status l e d to diverging evaluations of democratic structures, even when controlling for economic evaluations. Aallitionally, wefind that satisfaction with democracy is signijcantly lower in large district proportional representation (PR) systems relative to singlemember district systems and when the dijference between votes and legislative seat-shares is high. This finding suggests that we ought to reconsider the theoretical interaction between representativeness and efective governance as well as the democratic process versus the outcomes of elections.

In the spring of 2000, the department of political science at the University of Colorado received a Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) grant through the American Political Science Association. Grant funds were used to sponsor discussions about how best to prepare young political scientists to meet their professional and scholarly responsibilities as members of the discipline (see ). A central theme of a recent PFF meeting at Colorado was the importance of mentoring relationships in the process of graduate student education and faculty preparation.