Political support through representation by the government. Evidence from Dutch panel data

Research on political support demonstrates that satisfaction with democracy is higher among electoral winners than losers, and that it is higher for citizens who are ideologically more congruent with the government. In this paper, I analyze how support for the political system is affected by representation by the government. Expanding on previous studies, I leverage long-run panel data from the Dutch LISS panel spanning over several electoral cycles. Drawing on various measures that go beyond the distinction between election winners and losers and also measure how close citizens are to the government coalition as a whole, I show that being well represented by the government has a wide-ranging positive relationship with satisfaction with democracy, external efficacy and trust in political institutions. While this relationship is mostly short-run, political support can decline substantially if non-representation persists in the long-run. This highlights the relevance of long-run panel data for studying the consequences of representation.