REPLICATION MATERIAL to Patterns of Democracy and Democratic Satisfaction. Results from a Comparative Conjoint Experiment

In this study, we focus on how the components of political systems affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD). Compared to earlier studies, our approach is unique in that, by utilizing a survey experiment, we were able to disentangle the effects of otherwise highly collinear variables corresponding to three defining features of any political system, namely (1) access to power (who makes the decisions?), (2) the policy-making process (how are decisions made?), and (3) performance (what are the consequences of these decisions?). We fielded identical conjoint experiments in countries with significant variations across the key independent variables: France, Hungary, and Italy. Overall, our study supports the view that citizens are more satisfied with democracy in consensual systems than in majoritarian democracies, while it also contributes to identifying the respective weight of the specific components of political systems. In line with our expectations, respondents across all countries recognize that proportionality and the plurality of the political offer magnify their voice by creating a more representative political climate. With regards to the output legitimacy of the political system, we find that respondents identify good economic performance and public probity as important features of a well-performing democracy. Beyond the ‘input’ and ‘output’ sources of SWD, the decision-making process appears to play a greater and slightly different role than what is usually predicted in the literature. First, the observed effect of government fractionalization fits well with the idea that consensus systems featuring coalition governments generate more SWD. Second, we also find that citizens are less perceptive of the government’s parliamentary majority: the impact of government type is not always statistically significant and may thus be context-dependent. Third, the positive effect of the legislators’ constituency orientation on SWD is a particularly noteworthy result that is found less frequently in the literature. Moreover, the state of the economy has by far the biggest impact on SWD, which indicates a highly materialistic view of democracy in all three countries. The strong effect of the economy as opposed to the institutional setup also suggests that, perhaps, institutions matter less than we initially thought.<b>Data providers:</b>-- Hungary: NRC Marketingkutató és Tanácsadó Kft.-- France: MIS GROUP SASU-- Italy: Cint Southern Europe SL<b>Questionnaire programming</b>: Laura Emőke Nagy<b>Replication code</b>: Zsófia Papp<b>Software</b>: Stata 16