POLITICAL SATISFACTION IN OLD AND NEW DEMOCRACIES

This paper examines the determinants of cross-national differences in political satisfaction across established and new democracies. On the basis of directly comparable data from over twenty West and East European countries collected between 1993 and 1995, it investigates political culture and performance-based explanations of cross-national differences in support for the political system, and it compares the usefulness of these theories across both mature and emerging democratic systems. The analysis suggests that political culture and system performance both are associated with levels of satisfaction with the political system in older democracies. Moreover, it shows that the influence of political culture is weaker than indicators of current performance once alternative explanations are taken into account. In contrast, political satisfaction levels in emerging democracies are unrelated to political culture or system performance. Overall, the results indicate that the structure of democracy satisfaction is dissimilar in old and new democratic systems. Send all correspondence to: Christopher J. Anderson Department of Political Science Binghamton University (SUNY) Binghamton, NY 13902 E-mail: canders@binghamton.edu Fax: (607) 777-2675 Phone: (607) 777-2462 1 POLITICAL SATISFACTION IN OLD AND NEW DEMOCRACIES In the aftermath of the Cold War, the established democratic systems of Western Europe have been subject to increasing pressures created mainly by economic problems and the absence of a common enemy. One side-effect of such pressures has been a trend toward lower levels of citizen satisfaction with the way democracy works (Kaase 1995; Kaase and Newton 1995). The end of the Cold War also has produced considerable challenges for the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. After an initial enthusiasm for democratic governance in the early 1990s, problems with the economic transition, the construction of civil society, and the implementation of political reforms have led to widespread disillusionment with politics among citizens of newly emerging democratic systems (Mishler and Rose 1996). Political scientists have long argued that low levels of citizen support can pose serious problems for democratic systems because both the functioning and the maintenance of democratic polities are intimately linked with what and how citizens think about democratic governance (Lipset 1959; Powell 1982, 1986). This is not only the case for more mature democratic systems; it is equally true for systems undergoing democratic transitions. In fact, questions of popular support for democratic governance are particularly important for emerging democracies because citizen support is of practical and immediate relevance for the continued stability of emerging democratic institutions (Mishler and Rose 1997). Understanding why democracies differ in their levels of public approval for democratic governance is thus important for theoreticians and policymakers alike. There is significant cross-national variation in support for democratic governance. Among the West European countries, for example, Italians are notoriously dissatisfied with the way their democracy works, whereas citizens in the Scandinavian countries, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands typically express a great deal of satisfaction (Fuchs, Guidorossi, Svensson 1995). Students of empirical democratic theory have sought to