Abstract
The last decade has witnessed the rise of populist parties and a number of actors that question liberal democracy. Many explanations of this rely on dissatisfied citizens. We ask in this article whether and how institutions allowing citizens to participate in policy-making affect differences in democratic satisfaction within varying representative contexts as well as between electoral winners and losers. To do so, we first develop a measure of sub-national direct democracy and then use it together with extensive survey data to investigate how direct democracy is associated with citizens’ evaluation of their democratic system. We conclude that direct democracy is not generally related to more satisfied people but rather closes the “satisfaction-gap” between electoral winners and losers. In contrast to previous research, we demonstrate that this mechanism holds across different representative systems.
Highlights
Recent decades have seen an intensified interest in democratic satisfaction
We ask: Is direct democracy related to higher levels of democratic satisfaction and how does it interact with representative democracy? Regarding the latter, we focus on how electoral winners and losers in different representative contexts react to direct democratic institutions
The core claim we make builds on the work by Anderson and Guillory (1997) that the representative system leads to a satisfaction gap between electoral winners and losers. We argue that this gap can be narrowed through direct democratic institutions; extensive forms of direct democratic institutions are capable of refilling this satisfaction gap such that the differences between winners and losers become smaller
Summary
We have pointed out the limits of cross-national analyses given the lack of variance with regards to direct democracy. Following the suggestions of an anonymous reviewer, we estimate one set of models, where we count how many direct democratic institutions are present in a sub-national unit, while not taking into account the ease by which they can be used These results are presented in Supplemental Table A15. These results clearly suggest that direct democracy closes the gap between winners and losers in an electoral system This mechanism is not bound to one particular representative system, as suggested by previous literature (Bernauer & Vatter, 2012; Radcliff & Shufeldt, 2016) but seems to be relevant across the majoritarian and consensual sub-national democracies of Switzerland, the United States, Germany, and Austria. The latter is not significant, corroborating our previous conclusion that the relationship between direct democracy and democratic satisfaction does not systematically vary between different representative systems
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