Education and Support for Representative, Direct and Stealth Democracy

Abstract

Growing levels of skepticism towards institutions of representative democracy have led to a growing interest for alternative ways of decision-making, both among scholars and politicians. Using data collected within an ongoing Dutch internet panel survey (LISS) in 2011, we track citizens’ support for direct, stealth and representative democracy according to their educational level. Our findings indicate that lower educated citizens are more likely to support both direct and stealth democracy compared to higher educated. When contrasting the different decision-making processes with one another, our results reveal higher levels of support for direct democracy compared to both representative and stealth democracy among lower educated compared to higher educated. Even though most of the educational gaps remain substantial once political attitudes are controlled for, some gaps can be (partly) explained by lower educated citizens’ lower levels of political efficacy, trust and satisfaction. In general then, our study finds support for political dissatisfaction theories which suggest low education and political dissatisfaction to result in a demand for an alternative decision-making process; an alternative that would contain less citizens’ involvement (stealth democracy) but primarily one that means more engagement (direct democracy) compared to representative democracy.