The Effects of Political Attitudes on Affective Polarization: Survey Evidence from 165 Elections

How do individual-level political attitudes influence affective polarization on a global scale? This article contributes to the debate on the social distance of party affect by testing a set of hypotheses in 165 elections across the world. With a sample of over 170,000 voters, the results of multilevel mixed-effects regressions demonstrate that ideological radicalism, political knowledge, and external efficacy substantively affect how voters see the main political parties in electoral disputes taking place in 52 countries from 1996 to 2019. Satisfaction with democracy, however, is context-dependent; it positively influences affective polarization only when generalized democratic satisfaction is low. Furthermore, I show that these correlations remain stable regardless of the operationalization of affective polarization—that is, based on two dominant parties and weighted for multiparty competition. These findings provide robust inputs to the study of party preferences and social distance in a cross-national longitudinal perspective.

Trust in Latin American Governing Institutions

The end of dictatorships, civil wars, and exclusive party systems by the close of the 20th century was a genuine cause for optimism about democracy in Latin America. Once the euphoria surrounding transitions subsided, the cold realities of transitioning to open market economies thrust the region into a crisis of representation. That is, Latin America’s parties, elected officials, and voters struggled mightily to achieve the democratic ideals of representation, accountability, effective citizenship rights, and rule of law (inter alia, Frances Hagopian’s “After Regime Change: Authoritarian Legacies, Political Representation and the Democratic Future of South America”; Jorge Domínguez’s “Latin America’s Crisis of Representation”; Kenneth M. Roberts’s “Party-Society Linkages and Democratic Representation in Latin America”; Scott Mainwaring’s “The Crisis of Representation in the Andes”). In many Latin American countries, a general malaise set in that bubbled over (again) with protests in 2019. COVID-19’s global pandemic placed a temporary lid on this simmering situation but likely exacerbated the region’s crisis of representation. Viewed as a barometer for democratic viability, political trust has become a lynchpin among institutional, behavioral, and cultural theories of democratization. Though “political trust” could refer to myriad institutions, we conceptually circumscribe it to governments, legislatures, political parties, local government, the judiciary, the police, the military, and the civil service / bureaucracy. We acknowledge that a research tradition built on David Easton’s conception of political system support (A Systems Analysis of Political Life, 1965; “A Re-assessment of the Concept of Political Support,” 1975) views presidential approval and satisfaction with democracy as conceptually kindred to political trust. We nevertheless distinguish these concepts because satisfaction with democracy remains in conceptual and empirical limbo after decades of debate. Moreover, early-21st-century work from the Executive Approval Project and others diverges theoretically from political trust by considering characteristics (e.g., gender, ideology) and actions (e.g., scandals, executive decrees) of a single person, the president, as opposed to institutions more broadly. We also acknowledge the tradition of Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture (1963), which analyzes interpersonal trust alongside political trust. Research on interpersonal trust in the region has, unfortunately, lagged behind research on political trust and, if anything, has hewn more closely to the multidisciplinary work on prosociality than the culturalist tradition. In sum, interpersonal trust, presidential approval, and support for and satisfaction with democracy arise in the works cited in this article. But we view them as conceptually distinct from political trust and judge the scholarly advances related to the latter as worthy of separate treatment. Scholars have invested vast resources into measuring political trust, theorizing its drivers, and modeling its implications. This article explores advances on those three fronts. Along the way it highlights major breakthroughs and unresolved questions.

The winner-loser satisfaction gap in the absence of a clear outcome

In this manuscript, we examine the impact of voting for the winning candidate on satisfaction with democracy. While extensive evidence exists documenting this relationship, it is almost entirely correlational in nature. We take advantage of survey timing during the 2000 post-election period in the U.S. when the vast majority of respondents were uncertain about who would win the presidency. Employing 2000–2002 panel data and using a difference-in-differences model, we are able to establish a relationship between electoral outcome and satisfaction with democracy that appears only for respondents interviewed once the outcome became official. We find an increase in satisfaction among winners and a parallel decrease among losers from 2000 to 2002. Importantly, our design allows us to go further than most studies to make causal claims.

The Logic of the Punisher: Retrospective Voting and Hyper-Accountability in Lithuania

This article explores the roots of electoral hyper-accountability in Central and Eastern Europe. I focus on Lithuania: a country that is a stable liberal democracy, but has re-elected none of its governments (in the same party composition) since the restoration of independence. Survey data from the Lithuanian National Election Study reveal that Lithuanian voters are constantly dissatisfied with the economy and retrospectively evaluate it worse than the objective indicators would suggest. This partially explains why the Lithuanian voters constantly turn away from the government parties at parliamentary elections. However, their subsequent choice between parliamentary and new (previously marginal) parties is another puzzle. Using the 2016 Lithuanian post-election survey, I test how retrospective voting (economic and corruption issues) and political factors (trust and satisfaction with democracy) explain vote choice between the three types of parties (governmental, oppositional, and successful new party). It appears that new parties in Lithuania capitalize on double dissatisfaction, as the logic of the punisher comprises two steps. First, due to economic discontent, she turns away from the incumbent. Second, due to political mistrust, she often turns not to the parliamentary opposition, but to new parties. An analysis of retrospective economic evaluations hints at the political roots of hyper-accountability: these two steps are connected, as dissatisfaction with democracy is a strong predictor of negative retrospective evaluations of economy. Additional analysis of the 2019 post-election survey corroborates the results and reveals that a similar logic also applies in direct presidential elections.

Are People More Satisfied with Democracy When They Feel They Won the Election? No

Citizens who voted for a party ending up in government are more satisfied with democracy than those who supported a party that ends up in the opposition. The assumption is that voting for a party that is included in the government produces a perception of having won the election, which increases one’s level of satisfaction with democracy. This (assumed) mediation has never been directly tested. In this research note, we provide the first empirical test of this mediation using data from the Making Electoral Democracy Work project, which includes a question tapping whether the respondent perceives the party she voted for won or lost the election. We do not find support for the mediation hypothesis. We conclude that the meaning of the higher (lower) satisfaction observed among those who voted for a party included in the government (or in the opposition) remains ambiguous. Our research has important implications for the conceptualization of what it means to win or lose an election.

Satisfaction with Democracy in Perspective: Anchoring Today by Looking Back and Forward

This paper makes a novel contribution by turning an ‘asset’ lens onto social and technical innovation in the context of the small-scale generation of renewable energy. The authors draw on learning from an international project that aimed to develop innovative technologies for the micro generation of energy using wastes and residues. Variations on innovation that cut across the social and technical are introduced. It is noted that although emanating from different traditions, a common theme is emphasis on a distributed knowledge base in which the roles of innovator, producer and consumer overlap or merge. This implies that the (social) innovation process is also one of co-creation. The authors borrow from international development studies the Sustainable Livelihood Analysis (SLA) framework, which is usually used for working with poor households to foreground strengths and resources rather than needs and deficits. To illustrate the utility of SLA for social innovation at local and community level, findings are presented from UK fieldwork on socio economic barriers and opportunities affecting the feasibility of new community energy generation and enterprise options. The importance and the fragility of human assets are highlighted.

Social representations of the democracy. Cognitions and attitudes in 34 nations

This article aims to emphasize the role played by social representations for understanding democracy. In this context, the article is relevant for both political psychology and political normative theory. At the empirical level, the study has several research objectives like: i. to analyse the importance of democratic order in different geographical areas; ii. to estimate several determinants of the satisfaction with democracy; iii. to estimate a model based on social representations of the democratic order. In correlation with the research objectives, empirical findings present three main variables which are related with the satisfaction with democracy (economy, political elite and gender equality with p <0.01). In this context, subjective perception of the economic welfare and political elite are classical variables for explaining the dynamic of democracy. Beyond traditional and liberal framework of understanding democratic order, gender equality is relevant for more than 70% of the statistical sample. In this context, political theory should be nuanced by the empirical findings and should develop a discreet normative framework for understanding the psychological dimension of the democracy.

Mainstream Voters, Non-Voters and Populist Voters: What Sets Them Apart?

Three different constituencies are becoming increasingly common across Western European electorates: mainstream voters, non-voters and populist voters. Despite their distinct behaviours in electoral politics, we have limited empirical knowledge about the characteristics that distinguish these three groups, given the typical underrepresentation of non-voters in surveys and the relative recency of large-scale research on populist voters. To address this gap, we analyse novel survey data from contemporary Germany that oversamples non-voters and includes a sizeable share of both populist radical left and populist radical right party supporters. Two main findings with broader implications stand out. First, populist voters resemble their mainstream counterparts in their expectations about democracy but correspond more closely to non-voters regarding (dis-)satisfaction with democracy. Second, non-voters and populist voters seem to reject mainstream democratic politics in distinct ways, throwing doubt on the (further) mobilization potential of abstainers for populist projects.