Abstract
Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, this paper examines differences between West and East European countries in their levels of satisfaction with the way democracy works. Compared to East European countries, satisfaction levels were considerably higher in Western countries (West Europe, North America, and Oceania). Moreover, there was considerably greater inequality in the distribution of satisfaction in East European, compared to Western, countries. When these facts were combined to construct “equity-sensitive” satisfaction averages, the gap between Western countries and East European countries was even greater than suggested by a comparison of average satisfaction levels. This raised the question of why satisfaction levels varied so markedly between these two sets of countries. A logit model suggested that a number of factors were important for determining whether people were satisfied with the way democracy worked in their countries. While there was a difference between Western countries and East European countries in their endowments of these satisfaction-inducing factors (income, gender, participation, education, among others), when the equations were estimated separately for the Western countries and East European countries, the coefficient responses associated with several of these factors also differed markedly between the two groups.
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Notes
Indeed, Cannache et al. (2001) have called into question the entire concept of voter satisfaction.
The countries were: Australia, Belarus, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, and the United States.
In the language of economics, the two situations would yield the same hypothetical level of social welfare, i.e., be ‘welfare equivalent’.
A related question was: Thinking of the last election in [country], where would you place it on a scale of one to five, where ONE means that the last election was conducted fairly and FIVE means that the last election was conducted unfairly?
It should be pointed out, parenthetically, that being dissatisfied with the democratic process raises issues which are broader than the fairness of elections. A related question asked by CSES was: thinking of the last election in [your country], where would you place it on a scale of one to five, where ONE means that the last election was conducted fairly and FIVE means that the last election was conducted unfairly? Of the 51,590 respondents who answered this question, 3,490 respondents (7 %) returned “5” as their answer to this question. In several countries there was inconsistency between being satisfied with the democratic process and views about electoral fairness: in Peru, for example, 45 % of respondents thought that the 2000 election had been conducted unfairly but 18 % were not at all satisfied with the democratic process; in Thailand, 24 % of respondents thought that the 2001 election had been conducted unfairly but only 4 % were not at all satisfied with the democratic process.
In fact we reversed the original CSES assignment of 1 for maximum satisfaction and 4 for maximum dissatisfaction.
The changes in the probability of the outcome (in this case, “satisfied” with the way democracy works), following a change in the value of a variable, is the marginal probability associated with that variable.
Excluding Israel.
The t value was 1.60 with Pr>|t|=11.1.
However, one cannot rule out reverse causation, namely that people voted because they were satisfied rather than people were satisfied because they voted.
Compared to the residual category, respondents who were “not in the labor force” (including the permanently disabled).
However, in the Western European countries studied here only the United States had an elected head of state.
Compared to the coefficient responses of East European respondents, the coefficient responses of Western countries respondents were more conducive to satisfaction.
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Acknowledgements
The data used in this paper are from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems—Module 1 (1996–2001) available from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), http://www.icpsr.umich.edu. An earlier version was presented at the Annual Conference of the European Public Choice Society, Izmir, April 2010 and thanks are due to participants for their comments. We are very grateful to the Associate Editor (Europe) and three anonymous referees for comments that have substantially improved the paper. However, we are entirely responsible for the paper’s deficiencies.
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Borooah, V.K., Katos, A.B. & Katsouli, E. Inter-country differences in voter satisfaction with the democratic process: a study of world elections. Public Choice 157, 569–584 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-013-0134-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-013-0134-2