Democratic resilience: Citizens' evaluation of democratic performance during the great recession

• Autores: Alejandro Tirado Castro
• Directores de la Tesis: Robert Fishman (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid ( España ) en 2022
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Pedro Riera Sagrera (presid.), Guillermo Cordero García (secret.), Ruth Dassonneville (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Ciencias Sociales / Social Sciences por la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
• Materias:
  • Ciencia política
    • Instituciones políticas
    • Vida política
      • Elecciones
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: e-Archivo
• Resumen

  • The Great Recession was an unprecedented economic and political shock which stirred the stability and vitality of Western democracies and eroded the legitimacy of consolidated democracies. While some Western democracies managed to overcome the shock and show that their institutions were resilient, other democracies were indefinitely damaged. Moreover, during this period, political actors who were disloyal to democratic principles appeared in all Western political scenarios, while polarization became an even greater problem. This dissertation analyzes citizens' evaluation of democratic performance during the Great Recession and examines the main political phenomena that played a fundamental role in changing and determining satisfaction with democracy in the European context.

    This thesis has four basic objectives, all intended to analyze and better understand citizens' evaluations of the functioning and evolution of democracy, and the main determinants of change in those evaluations during the Great Recession. In pursuit of the first objective, I examine the evolution of satisfaction with democracy in EU countries during the Great Recession. On average, democratic satisfaction in EU countries decreased substantially after the onset of the Great Recession and, contrary to expectations, the recovery of satisfaction with democracy did not parallel the economic recovery of these countries, especially those most affected by the economic crisis (Lobo & Lewis-Beck, 2021; Ruíz-Rufino & Alonso, 2017; Schraff & Schimmelfennig, 2019; Valgarðsson & Devine, 2022). However, the crisis of democratic legitimacy was not equally pronounced in all EU countries. For example, there are democracies that suffered severe economic damage during the Great Recession and maintained stable levels of satisfaction with democracy, while others that experienced less economic impact suffered a sharp decline in democratic satisfaction. Similarly, some democracies now face a new paradigm of democratic legitimacy, where levels of satisfaction with democracy are now well below the pre-crisis average.

    The second objective of this dissertation is to classify EU democracies according to these trajectories in order to make a theoretical and empirical contribution on the consequences of shocks. Democracies are constantly confronted with exogenous shocks. which, as I argued above, can weaken specific support for democracy and thus democratic legitimacy as a whole. In just 20 years, European democracies have faced an economic crisis that can only be compared to the crash of '29, and a global pandemic that is hardly unprecedented. Under conditions of strong democratic legitimacy, citizens might temporarily accept certain economic restrictions or make personal sacrifices required of their governments to cope with the aftermath of the shock. Thus, this second objective refers to the classification of countries as resilient or non-resilient in terms of satisfaction with democracy in the face of an exogenous shock. The resilience attribute refers to the ability of a system to avoid or adapt to adverse circumstances and still function properly (Bonnano, 2004; Joseph, 2013). If democracies manage to maintain their stability or restore their prior level of satisfaction with democracy by adapting to adverse circumstances, such democracies can be considered resilient.

    Third, I identify the main determinants of satisfaction with democracy and the “winner-loser gap” during this period. This purpose of this dissertation is not only to understand how satisfaction with democracy evolved during the Great Recession, but also to identify the main determinants that explain the variation of specific support for democracy. Evidently, the economic nature of the Great Recession has led many scholars to focus on macroeconomic conditions and changes to explain the different trajectories of satisfaction with democracy (Armingeon & Guthmann, 2014; Bermeo & Bartels, 2014; Cordero & Simón, 2016; Magalhães, 2014; Torcal, 2014). Without dismissing these theories, this dissertation proposes a different empirical approach: It is not only macroeconomic conditions or institutional configurations that determine democratic satisfaction, but also citizens' perceptions of the economic and political performance of elites in their country. In other words, what matters is not so much whether or not there has been an economic recovery in macroeconomic terms, but whether citizens evaluate positively or negatively the performance of politicians and institutions during these times of crisis. Similarly, this thesis focuses on the salience of elections because of their impact on satisfaction with democracy. As argued earlier, winners of elections show greater satisfaction with the functioning of democracy than do losers after the election period (Anderson, 2005; Clarke & Acock, 1989; Craig et al., 2006). If satisfaction with democracy is strongly influenced by electoral dynamics, this could also have long-term implications for the stability of democratic legitimacy, that is, beyond the salience of elections.

    Finally, in pursuit of the fourth objective I highlight the role that certain electoral strategies of political parties can play in undermining the level of democratic satisfaction and thus the basic principles of democracy. Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) have persuasively argued that political parties should be the main gatekeepers of democratic principles and that they must preserve democratic legitimacy, among other tasks. Among these principles is the practice of mutual tolerance, according to which parties portray their opponents as legitimate and democratic, and not as their "enemies to be defeated". However, current politics is characterized by a climate of hostility and mistrust, fueled to a large extent by the parties’ polarizing strategies. This climate of political hostility permeates the citizenry where individuals begin to perceive their political opponents as their enemies, which reinforces the so-called affective polarization of citizens. After all, if your enemies are located within the democratic institutions, it is logical to perceive that democracy is failing or weak. That is, polarization in electoral periods not only weakens the principle of mutual tolerance, but also significantly reduces specific support for democracy. This thesis aims to understand and analyze the configuration of polarization and the mechanisms that cause satisfaction with democracy to decrease in a polarized environment.To achieve these goals, this dissertation presents three research articles in the form of a compendium.

    The first article is "Democratic Resilience: Political Efficacy and Satisfaction with Democracy during the Great Recession". This article examines the evolution of democratic satisfaction and the moderating effect of key democratic features during moments of crisis, focusing on the aftermath of the Great Recession in EU countries. The article formulates democratic resilience as the set of democratic characteristics that successfully adapt to or overcome democratic delegitimization processes after a shock, characteristics that can be either institutional or general perceptions of citizens about the performance of political institutions. In the first section, I conceptually reformulate the notion of democratic resilience in light of the increasing importance of this concept in the literature. Afterwards, I offer an innovative classification of democracies based on their evolution of satisfaction with democracy following the economic shock of the Great Recession. This classification is essentially an analytical tool that distinguishes between what I formulate as preventive, recovered, and damaged democracies. Preventive democracies are those that have suffered a shock but that have not experienced a significant decline in satisfaction with democracy. Recovered democracies are those that have experienced a significant decline in satisfaction with democracy after the shock but that have regained their previous average level of democratic support in the long run. Damaged democracies are those that have not recovered previous levels of satisfaction with democracy. Although this does not necessarily mean that the damage is permanent, political recovery in these cases will at least take longer than economic recovery from the shock itself.

    For the empirical analyses, I created a panel data set by merging three data sets - Eurobarometer, Varieties of Democracy, and Comparative Political Dataset- in which each observation corresponds to one European country in each year from 2004 to 2018. From the standpoint of estimation techniques, I used structural equation modeling, more specifically path analysis – endogenous to endogenous. Path analysis is ideally suited to the main objective of this article which is to account for both the direct and indirect effects of specific institutional variables on the outcome variable and requires assumptions similar to those of linear regressions. Basically, this article proposes that institutional and macroeconomic conditions directly influence citizens’ perceptions about responsiveness and satisfaction with the national economy, while having a direct and indirect effect on satisfaction with democracy.

    The study of democratic satisfaction trajectories during the Great Recession shows the devastating impact of the economic crisis in Southern Europe and the transitory damage caused in several EU democracies in terms of citizens’ evaluations of their democracy’s performances. Following the idea of output-oriented legitimacy (Scharpf, 1999), the results show that variation in democratic satisfaction depends less on how countries managed the 2008 crisis economically than on how crisis management was perceived by the population. Perceived responsiveness as well as perceptions of economic effectiveness prove to be drivers of crucial variation in satisfaction with democracy. The greater the citizens’ perception of having responsive leaders and the greater the ability of these leaders to effectively communicate economic results to the population, the greater the chances of coping with the backlash of the Great Recession without a deterioration in democratic satisfaction. Moreover, from an institutional perspective, Quality of Government is a necessary attribute for democracies to have a reservoir of democratic legitimacy in which elected governments can increase the response to citizens’ policy preferences. Government effectiveness and the absence of corruption have a major impact on the level of satisfaction with democracy in EU countries.

    The second article is entitled “The Winner-Loser Gap in Polarized Elections in the EU Countries”. This article is premised on the significance of the principle of mutual tolerance as a sine qua non condition for protecting democracy from backsliding. Party polarization, which has a top-down character, has apparently become one of the most effective strategies in election campaigns and a negative feature of current politics. The negative consequences of parties’ polarizing actions play a role in creating a trade-off between electoral outcomes and democratic strength. Both scholars and the media are increasingly warning that party polarization is growing significantly and could have devastating consequences for European democracies. Indeed, some authors have looked at the detrimental effect of polarization on satisfaction with democracy in European multiparty systems during elections (Dassonneville & McAllister, 2020; Ezrow & Xezonakis, 2011; McCoy et al., 2018). Accordingly, election winners tend to show higher satisfaction with democracy while losers show greater democratic dissatisfaction, i.e., the winner-loser gap. The literature does not address the interaction between these phenomena: the winner-loser gap and party polarization. The main contribution of this article is to examine this gap in the literature and provide empirical evidence on the connection between polarization and the winner-loser gap. To this end, this research focuses on European multiparty contexts during the Great Recession, using data from the European Social Survey and the innovative V-Party Dataset, which contains information on the position of political parties. This context and time period are particularly interesting because party polarization has recently attracted a great deal of scholarly attention and, as my article shows, party polarization increases sharply after the onset of the economic crisis. From an analytical perspective, I use multilevel analysis, or more precisely hierarchical multilevel models, in which individual and institutional estimators are used to calculate variation in satisfaction with democracy. The analyses are mainly based on the interaction between citizens' voting status and party polarization. Election winners are considered to be those who voted for the respective governing party or parties-including junior coalition parties- and election losers are the remaining citizens who participated in the elections.

    Another notable contribution to the polarization literature is based on the use of different dimensions to measure party polarization. In the literature, party polarization is usually measured as the ideological distance that exists between different political parties with respect to economic positions (Dalton, 2008; Fiorina & Abrams, 2008). During the Great Recession, economic issues significantly shaped the political debate in many European countries, especially in the early years of the economic crisis (Armingeon & Guthmann, 2014; Bermeo & Bartels, 2014; Cordero & Simón, 2016; Magalhães, 2014; Torcal, 2014). However, this is not the only issue that has been consistently at the forefront of political dynamics since the beginning of the crisis, and other political debates have also polarized the political arena (Dancygier & Margalit, 2020; Mole et al., 2021). For example, immigration has been a central issue in many countries, and, indeed, Brexit was strongly influenced by this type of polarization. Therefore, in operationalizing the concept in this study, I use not only economic polarization, but also three other types of polarization: disagreement regarding immigration, LGTBi+ rights and welfare. To calculate party polarization in each EU country, I used Dalton’s (2008) formula, in which polarization is the summation of the ideological distance between each party’s position on each topic and the average position of all parties, divided by five and squared. Not all parties are equally strong in elections and contribute equally to the level of polarization. For this reason, this value is multiplied by the percentage of votes each party obtained in the previous elections.

    Initially, I hypothesize two effects of party polarization on the gap in satisfaction with democracy between winners and losers. The first hypothesis is that election winners are more satisfied with the way democracy works after highly polarized election than losers who suffered defeated. The second hypothesis states that party polarization erodes satisfaction with democracy among winners and losers alike, and that the more polarized an election is, the less democratic satisfaction for both groups. The results of this study show that neither hypothesis holds. The findings show that party polarization negatively affects satisfaction with democracy among both winners and losers of elections, especially among the former. The analysis reveals that as party polarization increases, satisfaction with democracy decreases so much among winners that the winner-loser gap narrows significantly and even disappears in some polarizing contexts. With the exception of LGTBi+ polarization, all types of polarization reduce the winner-loser gap. Given these puzzling results, I conclude this article by discussing three different mechanisms that might explain why, contrary to expectations, party polarization has such a detrimental effect on winners' satisfaction with democracy Based on the results obtained in the second article, I developed one of the main mechanisms presented and further elaborated it in the third article. The third article is called “Winners’ Loathing: How Affective Polarization Influences Democratic Dissatisfaction after Elections”. This article examines how certain partisan dynamics during elections, aimed at capitalizing on the votes of party sympathizers and weakening political opponents, also influence affective polarization and citizens' perceptions of the functioning of democracies. More specifically, the contribution of this article lies in examining the mechanisms through which affective polarization reduces post-election satisfaction with democracy after elections, particularly among winners, thus narrowing the winner-loser gap. To this end, the article is divided into two sections. First, the article examines the main triggers of affective polarization in electoral campaigns, focusing on two phenomena: party polarization (Costa, 2021; Moral & Best, 2022; Rogowski & Sutherland, 2016) and negative campaigning (Nai, 2020; Sood & Iyengar, 2016). Second, this paper examines the relationship between affective polarization and the winner-loser gap. I hypothesize that polarized winners show higher levels of dissatisfaction with democracy than polarized losers due to the electoral dynamics of certain parties, thereby narrowing the winner-loser gap.

    This study focuses on elections in European multiparty systems during the Great Recession. After the onset of the economic crisis, I find that both satisfaction with democracy and party polarization have changed substantially, with satisfaction with democracy dropping significantly and polarization rising considerably. Elections represent a fundamental core for the proper functioning of democracies, and it is at this point that the dynamics of party elections affect both satisfaction and affective polarization. To conduct the empirical analysis, this article relies on two databases from which individual- and party-level information is extracted for each of the European countries during the electoral period: the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the V-Party. I have also used multilevel analysis and structural equation modeling – path analysis- to test the hypotheses proposed in this research.

    The findings show that democratic dissatisfaction increases mainly due to affective polarization, party polarization, and negative campaigning. Similarly, party polarization increases the level of affective polarization, while the empirical evidence on the effects of negative campaigning on this phenomenon is not entirely robust. Moreover, the results show that the winner-loser gap decreases significantly due to the decline in satisfaction with democracy among affective polarized winners. In this article, I provide two answers to the question of why this tendency is stronger among winners than among losers of elections. First, the descriptive results show a higher degree of affective polarization among winners than among losers. Although the differences are not very large on average, this gap widens significantly in countries with a high degree of affective polarization. Second, and most likely, the dissatisfaction of winners is greater because winning an election does not mean the absolute defeat of political rivals; opponents can also gain positions within political institutions, i.e., seats in parliament. If you, as the winner, feel that the victory was not fulfilling, you are more likely to be dissatisfied with the way democracy works and even to question the way democracy works. As some scholars have suggested (Somer et al., 2021), polarization among citizens develops an attitude that undermines the principles of democracy and leads to what is known as democratic hypocrisy among winners of elections. If parties consistently pursue polarizing strategies during elections, it is likely to have a corrosive effect on democracy as a political system in the long run and open the door to more authoritarian and antidemocratic choices by citizens.

    Taken together, the three articles show bases both for hope and concern for the future prospects of democracy. My empirical analyses of democratic resilience and democratic challenges in Europe in the wake of the Great Recession add to existing literatures. My work contributes to both our empirical knowledge and our conceptual understanding of how democracy stands up to the new challenges that emerge in the context of crises.

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