Explanation Giving Promotes Democratic Satisfaction Regardless of Respondent Partisanship

Abstract

A central norm of democratic governance is that elected officials explain their behavior to constituents. Prior work shows that explanation giving can improve evaluations of the explainer and the decision they have reached. However, this work has not examined whether more frequent explanation giving is associated with higher levels of democratic satisfaction. We address this question using data from the European Social Survey and Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project. We find that democratic and government satisfaction is higher among individuals who believe the government explains its decisions and in countries rated as having a high level of explanation giving by expert raters. We further show that explanation giving is positively related to democratic and government satisfaction both for partisans who identify with a party in government and partisans who do not. In some cases, explanation giving thus narrows partisan gaps in political support. This is an important finding because explanation giving, unlike other moderators of partisan gaps in satisfaction, is something directly under the control of elected officials and thus a potentially potent remedy to partisan divisions in democratic satisfaction.