Economic inequality,winner-loser gap,and satisfaction with democracy

This study analyzes how economic inequality affects electoral winners and losers' satisfaction with democracy. We posit that both the poor and the rich have more at stake in elections when inequality is high. Electoral losers, whether they are the poor or the rich, are more likely to be dissatisfied with democratic systems when facing greater disparity in wealth. In contrast, electoral winners confronting higher inequality are more likely to express satisfaction with democracy. Employing a multilevel analysis of Comparative Study Electoral Systems (CSES) data, we find that the gap in satisfaction with democracy between electoral winners and losers widens as income inequality increases. Broadening the conventional wisdom that electoral systems mediate the effect of citizens' winner-loser status on their democratic attitudes, we demonstrate that the mediating effects of economic inequality are more critical than the institutional effects.     

Social and Political Consequences of Administrative Corruption: A Study of Public Perceptions in Spain

Spain experienced an outbreak of public sector corruption—much of it related to the involvement of regional and local administrators and politicians in the country's urban development boom—that angered the public and sparked calls for government reform. Using data from a 2009 survey that followed these events, the authors examine the association between perceived corruption and the attitudes and behaviors of citizens, including satisfaction with government and democracy, social and institutional trust, and rule‐breaking behaviors. The findings suggest that perceptions of administrative as well as political corruption are associated with less satisfaction, lower levels of social and institutional trust, and a greater willingness to break rules. Although these survey results cannot prove causation, they are consistent with the notion that administrative and political corruption damages the legitimacy of government in the eyes of citizens and weakens the social fabric of democratic society.     

Income inequality,electoral systems and party polarisation

This study analyses why income inequality and party polarisation proceed together in some countries but not in others. By focusing on the relationship between income inequality, the permissiveness of electoral systems and party polarisation, the study offers a theoretical explanation for how the combination of income inequality and permissive electoral systems generates higher party polarisation. After analysing a cross‐national dataset of party polarisation, income inequality and electoral institutions covering 24 advanced democracies between 1960 and 2011, it is found that a simple correlation between income inequality and party polarisation is not strong. However, the empirical results indicate that greater income inequality under permissive electoral systems contributes to growing party polarisation, which suggests that parties only have diverging ideological platforms due to greater income inequality when electoral systems encourage their moves towards the extreme; parties do not diverge when electoral systems discourage their moves towards the extreme.     

Can't get no satisfaction with the Westminster model? Winners,losers and the effects of consensual and direct democratic institutions on satisfaction with democracy

Are citizens in consensus democracies with developed direct democratic institutions more satisfied with their political system than those in majoritarian democracies? In this article, individual‐level data from the second wave of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and an updated version of Lijphart's multivariate measure of consensus and majoritarian democracy covering 24 countries are used to investigate this question. The findings from logistic multilevel models indicate that consensual cabinet types and direct democratic institutions are associated with higher levels of citizens' satisfaction with democracy. Furthermore, consensus democracy in these institutions closes the gap in satisfaction with democracy between losers and winners of elections by both comforting losers and reducing the satisfaction of winners. Simultaneously, consensus democracy in terms of electoral rules, the executive–legislative power balance, interest groups and the party system reduces the satisfaction of election winners, but does not enhance that of losers.     

The costs of electoral fraud: establishing the link between electoral integrity,winning an election,and satisfaction with democracy

Previous research has shown that voters’ perception of electoral fairness has an impact on their attitudes and behaviors. However, less research has attempted to link objective measurements of electoral integrity on voters’ attitudes about the democratic process. Drawing on data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the Quality of Elections Data, we investigate whether cross-national differences in electoral integrity have significant influences on citizens’ level of satisfaction with democracy. We hypothesize that higher levels of observed electoral fraud will have a negative impact on evaluations of the democratic process, and that this effect will be mediated by a respondent’s status as a winner or loser of an election. The article’s main finding is that high levels of electoral fraud are indeed linked to less satisfaction with democracy. However, we show that winning only matters in elections that are conducted in an impartial way. The moment elections start to display the telltale signs of manipulation and malpractice, winning and losing no longer have different effects on voter’s levels of satisfaction with democracy.     

Economic Crisis and Support for Democracy in Europe

The study of the impact of the economic crisis on attitudes toward democracy tends to be focused on satisfaction with specific democratic institutions. This article expands upon previous research to explore how the current economic crisis can affect core support for democracy as a regime. Based on European Social Survey data for the Eurozone countries, the findings are twofold. It is shown, firstly, that perceptions of the state of the economy have an impact both on satisfaction with and support for democracy, and, secondly, that citizens’ support for democracy is greater in bailed-out countries. In countries that have experienced intervention, the more critical citizens and those less satisfied with the outputs of democracy are the stronger advocates of democracy. The article argues that this is connected with the tendency of critical citizens in bailed-out countries to blame external agents for the economic situation while increasing the saliency of democratic rules as a reaction to the imposition of unpopular measures.     

Being unequal and seeing inequality: Explaining the political significance of social inequality in new market democracies

Market economies inevitably generate social inequalities, of which the new democracies of Central and East European (CEE) societies have seen dramatic – though widely diverging – levels of growth. Do CEE citizens believe that inequality is excessive and, if so, why? And what is the connection between perceptions of social inequality and citizens' views of new markets and democracy? These questions are addressed using new data from mass surveys conducted in 2007 in 12 post‐communist CEE states. Surprisingly weak links are found between social inequality perceptions and national‐level measures of inequality as well economic, social and political conditions. Perceptions of social inequality are mainly driven by individual‐level assessments of market and democratic performance, but not by market or democratic ideals.     

What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy?

Despite a growing interest in corruption, the topic has been absent from democratic theory. The reason is not a lack of normative issues, but rather missing links between the concepts of corruption and democracy. With few exceptions, political corruption has been conceived as departures by public officials from public rules, norms, and laws for the sake of private gain. Such a conception works well within bureaucratic contexts with well-defined offices, purposes, and norms of conduct. But it inadequately identifies corruption in political contexts, that is, the processes of contestation through which common purposes, norms, and rules are created. Corruption in a democracy, I argue, involves duplicitous violations of the democratic norm of inclusion. Such a conception encompasses the standard conception while complementing it with attention to the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within democratic politics. By distinguishing the meanings of inclusion and exclusion within the many institutions, spheres, and associations that constitute contemporary democracies, I provide a democratic conception of corruption with a number of implications. The most important of these is that corruption in a democracy usually indicates a deficit of democracy.     

Digital Politics in Western Democracies: A Comparative Study

Satisfaction with democracy is driven by the two mechanisms that affect citizens’ income: the market and the state. When people consider that the levels of economic growth and redistribution are sufficient, they are more satisfied with the performance of democratic institutions. This relationship is moderated by personal income: since low-income citizens are more sensitive to changes in personal economic circumstances than high-income citizens, they give more weight to economic perceptions and opinions about redistribution. In this paper evidence is found of this conditional relationship in survey data from 16 established democracies. The results offer a rich characterisation of the state and market-based mechanisms that affect satisfaction with democracy.     

Political parties, electoral systems and democracy: A cross-national analysis

Abstract.  The number of political parties and the type of electoral system may impact the level of democratic functioning within a government. Models are used to explore whether the number of political parties increases a country's democracy score on the POLITY IV measure of democracy, and whether countries with proportional representation electoral systems have higher democracy scores than those without. Multiple regression analysis reveals that countries with proportional electoral systems have higher democracy scores. Countries involved in the Third Wave of democracy may find the choice of an electoral system among the most important issues in structuring a democratic government.     

Perceptions of policy choice in contemporary democracies

Though the concept of choice is essential to democracy, little is known about how citizens make sense of the diversity of policies offered by political elites. Research has found that institutional arrangements such as low electoral thresholds and multiple party competitors are associated with greater policy choice. Other work emphasises non‐institutional factors. No research, however, examines what the voters think. In this article these alternative explanations are assessed in terms of whether citizens believe parties to provide choice over policy. Evidence from 25 democracies reveals that electoral and party systems have no direct effect. Choice perceptions are instead affected by non‐policy factors: social heterogeneity and individual political dispositions. This result contrasts with analyses showing a strong connection between electoral rules and the diversity of messages communicated by parties during campaigns. The article also shows how choice perceptions matter for political behaviour. Overall, study findings imply that the promise of institutions for fostering representation is weaker than previously assumed.     

Hold your nose and vote: corruption and public decisions in a representative democracy

This paper analyzes how corruption alters policy decisions in democracy, and examines whether this distortion can result in a long-term persistence of corruption even when the voters are well informed and rational. By applying a citizen-candidate model of representative democracy, the paper analyzes how corruption distorts the allocation of resources between public and private consumption, altering the policy preferences of elected and nonelected citizens in opposite directions. The outcome is a reduction in real public expenditure and, if the median voter??s demand for public goods is sufficiently elastic, a reduction in taxes. In this case, some citizens benefit indirectly from corruption. The paper also presents some empirical evidence that, in democratic countries, corruption results in lower tax revenue, and proceeds to show that, when this occurs, citizens anticipating a shift in preferences in favor of public expenditure may support institutions that favor corruption. This result complements the findings of other studies that have attributed the persistence of corruption in democracy to some failure on the part of the voters or the electoral system. It also bears implications for developing effective anticorruption strategies and for redefining the role that can be played by the international community.     

Do Politics in Europe Benefit from Politicising Corruption?

In this article, two unexplored trends in European electoral politics are highlighted. Using newly collected data the article tracks the politicisation of corruption in electoral campaigns from 1981 to 2011, an electoral strategy that has been increasing over time in most European countries. It then empirically tests two aspects of this campaign strategy. First, what are the factors that are systematically associated with a party’s decision to politicise corruption? Second, what are the electoral effects in terms of relative vote share for parties that politicise corruption? Using an original data-set that employs multi-level data (parties nested in countries) the results demonstrate first that politicisation of corruption occurs systematically more often among established parties from the main opposition, new parties and parties on the political right, and occurs as a function of country-level corruption, district magnitude and public party financing. Second, it is found that the main opposition and new parties that use such a campaign strategy make significant electoral gains relative to the previous election compared to parties that do not politicise corruption. Yet gains are offset in low-corruption countries. The findings demonstrate salient implications for research on party systems, corruption studies and democratic legitimacy, among other areas of investigation.     

The Eroding Effect of Corruption on System Support in Sweden

Sweden is consistently found at the top in international indices of corruption. In recent years, however, several instances of corruption have been exposed, and surveys show that large shares of Swedish citizens harbor perceptions that public corruption is widespread. Drawing on recent surveys, two questions are asked. First, to what extent do Swedish citizens believe that corruption constitutes a serious problem? Second, how do citizens' evaluations of the extent of public corruption affect support for the democratic system? Approaching the issue from a comparative Nordic perspective, the data indicate that Swedes are considerably more prone to believe that politicians and public officials are corrupt than their Nordic counterparts. The analysis also suggests that such perceptions constitute an important determinant of support for the democratic system. Thus, even in a least likely case of corruption, such as Sweden, growing concerns about corruption has a potential to affect democratic legitimacy negatively.     

Income inequality,development and electoral turnout – New evidence on a burgeoning debate

In this article, we comprehensively analyze the macro-level link between income inequality and electoral turnout. First, we re-examine prior studies which affirm that higher inequality puts a drain on electoral turnout in wealthy industrialized Western countries. Second, we evaluate whether there is an association between the two concepts in a larger, more representative sample of democratic elections around the world. Third, we analyze if income inequality has a different influence on participation in the Western and non-Western countries. Controlling for nine theoretically informed covariates, we assess these claims in a multilevel framework with evidence from more than 550 democratic elections between 1970 and 2010. We find little evidence that electoral turnout is affected by income inequality. Our results also indicate that this “null” effect does not differ between the Western- and the non-Western world. However, we do find evidence that mandatory voting laws and more decisive elections boost turnout considerably.     

False Consciousness or Class Awareness? Local Income Inequality,Personal Economic Position,and Belief in American Meritocracy

Existing research analyzes the effects of cross‐national and temporal variation in income inequality on public opinion; however, research has failed to explore the impact of variation in inequality across citizens’ local residential context. This article analyzes the impact of local inequality on citizens’ belief in a core facet of the American ethos—meritocracy. We advance conditional effects hypotheses that collectively argue that the effect of residing in a high‐inequality context will be moderated by individual income. Utilizing national survey data, we demonstrate that residing in more unequal counties heightens rejection of meritocracy among low‐income residents and bolsters adherence among high‐income residents. In relatively equal counties, we find no significant differences between high‐ and low‐income citizens. We conclude by discussing the implications of class‐based polarization found in response to local inequality with respect to current debates over the consequences of income inequality for American democracy.     

Democracy in Britain: Retrospect and Prospect

The EU referendum has raised questions about the nature of democracy, which is not just majority rule. It is wrong to claim that direct democracy has now replaced representative democracy, as Parliament is required to answer all the questions that the referendum did not. The conduct of the referendum reflected the worst aspects of Britain's political culture of sterile adversarialism. Both left and right have shared assumptions about governing that have made it difficult to develop a culture of democratic citizenship. The political system still reflects its pre‐democratic origins (as in the survival of a House of Lords and the obsession with titles) and the role of money in politics represents a form of corruption. Institutional reforms depend for their success on the nurturing of a democratic culture, which is a task for many hands.     

Equilibrium institutions: the federal-proportional trade-off

Durable democracies display a huge variety of combinations of basic institutional formulas. A quantitative logical model shows that while there are multiple equilibrium sets of institutions, each involves some trade-off between the size of the country, the territorial structure of government and the electoral system. Specifically, the larger the country, the more important is federalism in comparison to proportional representation electoral rules for the durability of democratic institutions. The explanatory power of the model is positively tested on all current durable democratic countries. It is also illustrated with a few both fitting and deviant cases. A relevant implication is that the room for manipulation of the choice of institutions is large, but not unlimited, as the choices for a durable democracy are constrained by bounded trade-offs between the values of major institutional variables.     

Habermas,market‐friendly human rights,and the revisibility of economic globalization

This article examines the impacts, on citizenship rights, democratic practice and public policy, of the constitution‐like regimes for the protection of investor rights embedded within contemporary international investment treaties. It argues that a central objective of these investment treaties is to remove specific governmental functions from the stock of policy instruments available to national governments and to democratic polities. Drawing upon Habermas' discourse‐theoretic approach to law and democracy, the article argues that national states have the room to deviate, if not withdraw from the current configuration of economic rights advanced and enforced through international investment treaties. A robust proceduralist approach to rights and democracy would subject these agreements to critical democratic practice and open space to revise and roll back some of the rules and institutions associated with economic globalization.     

The relationship between corruption and income inequality in U.S. states: evidence from a panel cointegration and error correction model

We investigate the causality between corruption and income inequality within a multivariate framework using a panel data set of all 50 U.S. states over the period 1980 to 2004. The heterogeneous panel cointegration test by Pedroni (Oxf. Bull. Econ. Stat. 61:653–670, 1999; Econom. Theory 20:597–627, 2004) indicates that in the long run corruption and the unemployment rate have a positive and statistically significant impact on income inequality while a negative impact is found for real personal income per capita, education, and unionization rate. The Granger-causality results associated with a panel vector error correction model indicate both short-run and long-run bidirectional causality between corruption and income inequality.