The Effect of Parties on Voters’ Satisfaction with Democracy

Abstract

Electoral ‘winners’ (i.e., voters casting a ballot for a party included in the post-electoral government) are acknowledged to be more satisfied with democracy than supporters of opposition parties. However, little is known about the influence of parties and their specifics on the boost in satisfaction with democracy experienced by their voters. To address this question, the research utilizes 17 surveys from 12 countries included in the European Social Survey rounds 1–8, for which a government replacement took place during the survey period. This allows this research to employ discontinuity design and examine the effect of two attributes related to parties—differences in party vote shares, and voters’ feeling of closeness to a party. The findings suggest that these factors have a negligible influence on voters’ satisfaction with democracy and only scant evidence is found that closeness to a party tends to increase their satisfaction. When voters’ attitudes from before and after a government replacement are compared, changes in government do not seem to strike voters as a surprise and thus they do not cause any sudden and lasting changes in the general attitudes of electorates. Nevertheless, this indicates a novel contribution to the literature: the effect of losing needs some time to fully develop until it results in a decrease in satisfaction level. Based on these findings, the research concludes that when it comes to parties’ characteristics, it is primarily the government/opposition status which determines voters’ degree of satisfaction with democracy.

Positioning analysis of Spanish politicians through their Twitter posts versus Spanish public opinion

“…Most studies concerning political communication are based on a qualitative research design (Abejón et al, 2019 ; Acosta, 2012 ; Acosta et al, 2017 ; Ernst et al, 2019 ; Kelm et al, 2019 ; Kulshrestha et al, 2018 ; Rojas-de-Gracia, 2019 ; Romero-Rodríguez et al, 2015 ), with quantitative studies being in the minority (Garmendia et al, 2022 ; Lorenzo-Rodríguez and Torcal, 2022 ; Nemčok, 2020 ). One of the novelties of this research is the study of political positioning from a double perspective, both qualitative and quantitative.…”

The winner-loser satisfaction gap in the absence of a clear outcome

“…However, the existing literature only provides partial answers to two issues that we seek to address further in this analysis. First, most studies mentioned above adduce correlational evidence—although see Nemčok (2020) who takes advantage of the timing of ESS fieldwork to examine the impact of winner/loser status on satisfaction. And, while panel data has been utilized in the past (e.g., Blais and Gélineau, 2007; Singh et al 2012; and Williams et al, 2021), existing studies generally examine attitudes immediately before and after an election, whereas we examine a longer time horizon.…”

Who won the election? Explaining news coverage of election results in multi‐party systems

“…Yet, to the best of our knowledge, we are not aware of studies analyzing which parties are portrayed as ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ in the first place; particularly not in countries with proportional representation. This is surprising because citizens’ perceptions of electoral winners and losers affect their satisfaction with democracy (Blais & Gélineau, 2007; Nemčok, 2020; Plescia, 2019; Plescia et al., 2021; Singh et al., 2012) and their perceived legitimacy of government parties (Plescia & Eberl, 2021). We know that election campaign coverage can influence voters’ expectations with respect to government formation (Bowler et al., 2021) and affect political trust and satisfaction with democracy (see Banducci & Karp, 2003; Lelkes, 2016).…”