Article
Election outcomes, legislative representation, and satisfaction with democracy
Party Politics 2017, Vol. 23(2) 85–95 ª The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1354068815583200 journals.sagepub.com/home/ppq
Andre´ Blais University of Montreal, Canada
Alexandre Morin-Chasse´ Columbia University, USA
Shane P Singh University of Georgia, USA
Abstract This paper disentangles the relationship between election outcomes and satisfaction with democracy. As the first comparative study to employ a measure of satisfaction immediately before and after elections, we can be unusually confident that any changes we observe are attributable to election outcomes. Following previous work, we affirm that voting for parties that win more votes, more legislative seats, and more cabinet seats boosts satisfaction with democracy. In addition, we demonstrate for the first time that voters are sensitive to deficits in representation; satisfaction with democracy decreases when one’s party’s seat share falls short of its vote share. Keywords elections, representation, satisfaction with democracy, voting behavior In a legislative election, people vote for a party1, which receives few or many votes and seats, and which does or does not enter government. We may assume that, everything else being constant, people hope that the party they support does well in the election; that is, it receives as many votes and seats as possible and, if it enters the legislature, it gets to be in government rather than in opposition. This study is about how the electoral performance of the party one supports in an election affects satisfaction with the way democracy works in the country or region. A vast literature has shown that, while elections tend to have a positive overall effect on satisfaction with democracy in the public (e.g. Adam, 2014; Blais and Ge´lineau, 2007; WeitzShapiro and Winters, 2011; see also Ginsberg and Weissberg, 1978), winning an election increases the size of this boost and losing an election can not only decrease any potential boost in satisfaction but also lead to net decreases in satisfaction with democracy (cf. Anderson et al., 2005; Bowler and Donovan, 2002; Conroy-Krutz and Kerr (2015); Henderson, 2008; Listhaug et al., 2009; Singh, 2014; Singh et al., 2011).
We take these findings as our point of departure. Traditionally, the literature has focused on the government dimension: winning an election is construed to mean voting for a party that is part of the government which is formed in the aftermath of an election, and losing means voting for a party that does not enter the government (Anderson et al., 2005: 34). Our goal in this study is to determine if voters react to the vote distribution, to the seat distribution in the legislature, and/or to the seat distribution in the cabinet when they reassess their degree of satisfaction with the way democracy works after an election. As far as we know, this is the only comparative study with a measure of satisfaction with democracy immediately before and after elections, therefore allowing us to
Paper submitted 1 July 2014; accepted for publication 27 February 2015 Corresponding author: Shane P Singh, University of Georgia, 303 Candler Hall, Athens, GA 30602, USA. Email:
[email protected]
86 determine whether electoral outcomes across countries modify citizens’ evaluations of how democracy works for the first time. After providing some background and our expectations, we discuss our results. We first reaffirm that voting for parties that win more votes, more seats, and more government representation boosts satisfaction with democracy. We also demonstrate, for the first time, that voters are sensitive to what we call ‘‘representation deficits.’’ Satisfaction with democracy decreases when one’s party’s seat share is not a fair reflection of its vote share, especially for those whose parties won relatively few seats and those with stronger connections to the party for which they voted.
Background and expectations While satisfaction with democracy is a disputed concept (cf. Booth and Seligson, 2009; Canache et al., 2001; Fuchs, 1993; Linde and Ekman, 2003), it is generally thought of as an expression of approval of regime performance located between diffuse notions of support for democratic principles and specific attitudes toward political actors (e.g. Aarts and Thomassen, 2008; Anderson and Guillory, 1997; Blais and Ge´lineau, 2007). Weighing in on the debate about the meaning of ‘‘satisfaction with democracy,’’ Anderson (1998: 583) asserts that it ‘‘measures system support at a low level of abstraction.’’ Further, while satisfaction with democracy correlates with a variety of democratic attitudes (e.g. Klingemann, 1999; Kornberg and Clarke, 1994), it is generally thought to be conceptually and empirically distinctive (e.g. Anderson and Guillory, 1997; Clarke and Kornberg, 1992; Fuchs, 1993; Kornberg and Clarke, 1992). Elections tend to increase satisfaction with democracy (e.g. Adam, 2014; Blais and Ge´lineau, 2007; WeitzShapiro and Winters, 2011; see also Ginsberg and Weissberg, 1978), and voting for a winning party can accentuate this increase (cf. Anderson et al., 2005; Bowler and Donovan, 2002; Henderson, 2008; Listhaug et al., 2009; Singh, 2014; Singh et al., 2011). There are two general mechanisms that are thought to underlie the relationship between winning and satisfaction; winning makes people happier by increasing the likelihood that their preferred policies will be implemented and it provides an emotional ‘‘payoff’’ associated with the experience of victory (see Anderson et al., 2005). Thus, voting for a party that forms the resulting government is especially important; one is more likely to see his or her policy preferences realized when his or her preferred party controls the executive, and the emotional reward associated with winning will be enhanced by such a large political victory. Though individual-level factors predominate in empirical models of democratic attitudes (Anderson and Singer, 2008), scholars increasingly view such attitudes as held by ‘‘individuals who are embedded in political contexts’’ (Dalton and Anderson, 2011: 3). For example,
Party Politics 23(2) recent research demonstrates that the relationship between winning and satisfaction is moderated by the characteristics and performance of the party that one supports and the makeup of the resulting government. For example, Curini et al. (2012) show that winning engenders satisfaction, but chiefly for those who are ideologically close to the resulting government, and Singh et al. (2012) find that voting for a party that enters the government leads to a bigger boost in satisfaction than voting for a party that only enters the legislature. Howell and Justwan (2013) find that satisfaction among winners is most elevated where the contest was close, while Singh (2014) finds that winning’s effect on satisfaction is especially pronounced for voters who selected winning parties to which they had strong psychological attachments. These latter two studies suggest that emotional investment in an election can indeed magnify the effect of victory on satisfaction. Meanwhile, losing an election can lead to a decrease in satisfaction, and the effects of losing are moderated by contextual factors (cf. Anderson et al., 2005; Singh, 2014). Elections can also affect satisfaction by shaping real and perceived representational outcomes. Representative democracy, in theory, should provide both political voice and accountability (Dahl, 1971; Powell, 2000), and perceptions of the extent to which democracy performs its representational function are known to affect behavior and attitudes in the public (Almond and Verba, 1963; Miller, 1974; Thomassen, 2014). Satisfaction with democracy, in particular, has been linked to descriptive, substantive, and perceived representation (cf. Aarts and Thomassen, 2008; Brunell and Buchler, 2009; Ruiz-Rufino, 2013). Here we consider deficits in representation, which we argue condition the effect of winning an election on satisfaction, offsetting the emotional boost thought to underlie this link. If a voter’s party is ‘‘punished’’ by the mechanics of the electoral system, winning fewer seats than would be proportional to its vote share, he or she may become less satisfied with the way in which representational democracy works. Further, a deficit in representation, even for those whose parties performed well, can bring about a sense of defeat, which in turn can engender anger, sullenness, disillusionment (Anderson et al., 2005: 23–26; McCaul et al., 1992; Willson and Kerr, 1999), and lower levels of democratic satisfaction. Essentially, underrepresentation can harm satisfaction with democracy by making one frustrated with how the ‘‘system’’ treats his or her party. Thus, we have two expectations. The first reflects previous work and anticipates that the degree of satisfaction is affected by one’s party’s performance in terms of votes, legislative seats, and cabinet seats, and that cabinet seats matter most because power is concentrated in government. The second is that voters are affected by the distribution of votes and seats and the extent to which these distributions create representational deficits; any potential boost in satisfaction with democracy associated with the election outcome
Blais et al.
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Figure 1. The effect of elections on satisfaction with democracy. Brackets represent 95% confidence intervals.
will attenuate among those who voted for a party whose seat share under-reflects its vote share.
Data, models, and findings We use the 13 panel election studies that were conducted for the Making Electoral Democracy Work (MEDW) project (see Blais, 2010) between 2011 and 2013 in 10 regions within five countries: Canada, France, Spain, Germany, and Switzerland.2 Each of these surveys has two waves, usually with about 1000 persons responding to the preelection questionnaire in the last two weeks of the campaign and about 800 of them responding to the post-election questionnaire immediately after the election. The surveys were conducted online among recruited panel members, with quotas that guarantee that the samples are representative of the population under study in regard to age, gender, education, and region. The two waves include a question asking respondents how satisfied they are with the way democracy works in their region or country (depending on the type of election) on a 0 to 10 scale. Because we have measures of satisfaction just before and after the election, we can be confident that the changes observed between the two waves are attributable to the election outcome. The dependent variable is the change in satisfaction between the two waves, which can theoretically range from –10 to þ10 (mean ¼ 0.251; SD ¼ 2.232; min ¼ –10; max ¼ 10). Figure 1 illustrates the mean difference in satisfaction with democracy before and after the election in each of our 13 election studies. The effect presented in the bottom of the figure presents the overall change when all observations are combined. Satisfaction with democracy is, on average, 0.23 points higher after the election.3 Nevertheless, as the
figure makes obvious, there is a lot a variation across elections. In eight studies out of 13, the data indicate a significant increase in satisfaction with democracy after the election. The largest effect is observed in the Catalonian sample for the Spanish 2012 national election, with an increase of 0.95 points. However, four election studies show no significant change, and the Lucerne 2011 regional election led to an unexpected decrease in satisfaction. The absence of a uniform effect of elections on satisfaction with democracy makes it all the more important to investigate whether electoral outcomes play a role in stimulating or dampening the effect. As per our first expectation, we preliminarily focus on three indicators of a party’s electoral performance: vote support, legislative seats, and seats in government. These three indicators are related to one another in a mechanical manner: vote distribution determines the legislative seat distribution, which in turn influences the cabinet seat distribution. This causal stream guides our approach to our initial set of analyses. We start with the first and most direct indicator of electoral performance, the proportion of votes obtained by the party supported by the Respondent. We regress change in satisfaction from wave 1 to wave 2 on the percentage the vote won by one’s party (mean ¼ 21.025; SD ¼ 12.425; min ¼ 0.200; max ¼ 44.630) and dummies for each election (with Lucerne’s 2011 regional election excluded as the baseline category).4,5 Abstainers are excluded from the analyses because, by definition, they did not support any party in the election. We control for the level of satisfaction in the first wave (mean ¼ 5.948; SD ¼ 2.571; min ¼ 0; max ¼ 10) in each analysis to neutralize floor and ceiling effects. As is standard in the satisfaction with democracy
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Table 1. Vote performance, seat performance, and satisfaction with democracy. Model 1 Vote Percentage
Model 2
Model 3
Model 4
0.014*** (0.001)
–0.034*** (0.006) 0.037*** (0.004)
–0.46*** (0.009) –0.155*** (0.043) 0.001 (0.002) 0.023* (0.009) P
–0.464*** (0.009) –0.158** (0.043) 0.0005 (0.002) 0.021* (0.009) P
–0.464*** (0.009) –0.166*** (0.043) 0.001 (0.002) 0.017y (0.009) P
–0.026*** (0.006) 0.026*** (0.005) 0.004*** (0.001) –0.463*** (0.009) –0.166*** (0.043) 0.001 (0.002) 0.016y (0.009) P
2.701***
2.761***
2.972***
2.968***
0.015*** (0.002)
Seat Percentage Cabinet Seat Percentage Satisfaction Before Election Female Age Education Dummies for each election constant n R2 Pr > F
(0.138) 8085 0.262
