The second half of the twentieth century has seen a rise in the number of democracies around the world as well as increased opportunities for citizens to influence decisionmaking in them. Because the relationship between citizens and their government is one of the fundamental issues in the study of democratic politics, public (dis)satisfaction with the democratic process and support for democratic institutions are an area of research that is ever more critical for our understanding of how and how well contemporary democracies function.
Building on research initiated in 1995, the purposes of the proposed project are to gather, analyze, and report data about how citizens' status as part of the political majority (winners) or political minority (losers) affects satisfaction with the political system and support for political institutions in over 50 contemporary democracies. Specific issues to be addressed include: (1) the pattern of variation in support among winners and losers across established and newly emerging democracies; (2) the dynamics of variation in winners' and losers' satisfaction over time; and (3) how political institutions mediate the relationship between winner/loser status and political support.
The proposed research combines study of institutional/contextual and individual-level influences on political support in a systematic fashion. Specifically, it combines an examination of democratic institutions and processes, individuals' voting behavior, and attitudes toward the political system. As such, the research fills a crucial gap between earlier studies that have focused separately on individual-level, systemic, or procedural influences on political support. Concentrating on elections as the central mechanism of citizen influence in democracies, the project is designed to investigate how elections produce winners and losers in the public mind, how winning and losing affects commitment to the democratic process, and how the political system works to amplify or dampen these effects.
