The Many Meanings of Democracy: How Democratic Understandings Shape Satisfaction with Democracy

Abstract

Satisfaction with democracy is an important indicator of the legitimacy of a political system, and therefore a much-researched indicator. However, not many attention is given to the question what a democracy actually is, which is surprising, because there are different understandings of what democracy means. Five important understandings are electoral, liberal, direct, social and populist-majoritarian democracy. This study, first, investigates what the effect is of congruence between an individual’s understanding of democracy and quality of that understanding of democracy on that individual’s satisfaction with democracy. There is no clear positive effect of factual quality on satisfaction with democracy, but there is a positive effect of perceived quality on satisfaction with democracy. This study also investigates the effect of an individual’s winner-loser status on satisfaction with democracy. This winner-loser status is divided into ‘voted for a winning party in the election’ and ‘voted for a party that is in government’. Liberal democrats and populist-majoritarian democrats become not much more satisfied when they voted for a winning party in the election, but they do become more satisfied when they voted for a party that is in government. However, the expectation was that the effect was bigger among populist-majoritarian democrats. The study also investigates the moderating effect of winner-loser status, which was expected to be bigger among populist-majoritarian democrats than among liberal democrats. This is only the case for the government part of winner-loser status.