Democratic Dissatisfaction in Southern Europe, 2018-2019

With the outbreak of the Great Recession, the European Union suffered an extraordinary crisis. More specifically, the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area had a particularly devastating impact on the Southern periphery of the EU, where unemployment levels rocketed and living standards dropped substantially (Bermeo and Pontusson 2012). At the same time, these countries have applied strong austerity policies, which have been generally rejected by the majority of the population and have contributed to a rise in inequality to levels not seen since before the 1930s (IMF, 2013). Since 2007, levels of satisfaction with democracy, trust in the democratic institutions and support for the EU and the euro dropped extraordinarily. This research project covers five surveys conducted in Spain, one of the main Southern European countries, on the topic of democratic dissatisfaction. The surveys contribute to a better understanding of the political consequences of the crisis in Southern Europe by analysing the increase in democratic disaffection and its relation with EU constraints, globalization and governments implementing policies that do not represent citizens’ preferences. The surveys also study responsibility attributions in a multilevel state like Spain. The main hypothesis of this project is that Southern European countries are undergoing a crisis of legitimation. Citizens' democratic dissatisfaction is the consequence of a responsiveness gap: that is, citizens' perception that governments are not responding to their demands anymore. The surveys allow to study how this crisis of representation and legitimation has taken place and its consequences. They provide information of what are the mechanisms by which democratic dissatisfaction increased in the decade after the Great Recession and the austerity measures implemented by the subsequent Spanish governments. All surveys include representative samples of the Spanish population. The data contains a collection of five surveys in which different views on satisfaction with democracy, views on the European Union and the financial crisis were asked in Spain.