Satisfaction with democracy as the evaluation of institutional structure, democratic process and economic performance

• Autores: Pablo Christmann
• Directores de la Tesis: Mariano Torcal Loriente (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat Pompeu Fabra ( España ) en 2017
• Idioma: español
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Tom Van Ourti (presid.), Malcolm Fairbrother (secret.), Aida Just (voc.)
• Materias:
  • Ciencia política
    • Instituciones políticas
    • Opinión publica
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
• Resumen

  • This thesis analyses the sources of public evaluations of democratic regimes from a comparative, a longitudinal perspective and a case study of Spain. The main argument of the dissertation is that peo-ple’s satisfaction with democracy (SWD) depends to a great degree on the quality of democratic processes and the institutional context. This conclusion does not deny the relevance of the well-documented relationship, defended by many scholars, between the status of the economy and SWD. The importance of the economy is clearly confirmed by the current dissertation. Instead, this thesis argues that economic factors complement the political ones. As will be shown, the long-term effects of the economy on SWD even de-pend on the quality of democratic processes and vice versa. This argument is presented in three different papers. In the first study, based on time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) data from 58 democra-cies between 1990 and 2012 and pooled surveys from the Compara-tive Study of Electoral Systems, I show that although electoral pro-portionality increases SWD, fractionalized party systems and coali-tion governments decrease SWD. In the second study, based on a twofold longitudinal panel analysis of the Spanish case between 1985 and 2015, I show that despite the negative consequences of prolonged economic crisis, political factors, most notably corruption, are equally relevant to explain the decline of SWD within this context. The third article, based on TSCS panel data from 61 de-mocracies between 1980 and 2014, shows that economic perfor-mance and democratic quality are equally important explanations to account for both cross-national and cross-time differences in SWD and that both factors are interrelated in their effects on SWD.