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106 | Anna Unger
a. Dissatisfaction with democracy
Though we are focusing on European tendencies here, it is important to note
that weakening satisfaction and growing dissatisfaction with democracy is not
something specific to Europe, but is a global trend (GSDR 2020, 9).
Before going into further details, two methodological comments are
to be made. ‘The first is that for measuring satisfaction with democracy,
there is no single valid methodology available. Some methodologies put
stronger emphasis on social life or political participation, while others also
include economic, financial, and further policy factors (like social security,
environment policy, and so on). At the same time, all the reports claim
that the satisfaction with democracy is usually referred to by people as a
satisfaction with both the functioning of their national democratic system,
on the one hand, and democracy as an idea, i.e. the concept of right and just
government, on the other.
The decade of the 2010s showed a growing dissatisfaction with democracy
according to almost all the analyses. In a global context, this tendency was
mirrored by the decreasing number of democracies, a phenomenon that
scholars call democratic decline, or democratic recession (Diamond 2015;
Diamond-Plattner 2015; Levitsky-Way 2015). The arguments of these studies,
both the pros and the cons concerning this supposed decline, are built on
the changing number of democracies across the world; the growing number
of so-called grey-zone countries, or hybrid regimes, which are neither fully
democratic nor autocratic; and the annual democracy and freedom indices,
which show a decreasing relevance of democracy and freedom in the world.
However, surveys also reveal a different, more complex picture. For
instance, the Pew Research Center (PRC) found in 2017 that people still
supported democracy relatively strongly, even if they were increasingly
critical of its representative system and open to other forms of popular
government. Europeans preferred democracy to non-democratic systems,
but it is important to note that the majority of them were only less than fully
committed to representative democracy (PEW 2017, 5) - though a large
majority found the idea of representative democracy ‘good’ or ‘very good,
at an average of 80 per cent (PEW 2017, 20).
The same report also found that the strength of this commitment had
probably structural reasons: “Countries that are classified as more fully
democratic and that have a higher percentage of the public committed to
representative democracy also tend to be wealthier” (PEW 2017, 7). Moreover,
peoples perception and assessment of democracy are strongly determined
by their personal economic situation and future prospects.
This survey also showed that Europeans were less satisfied with the
functioning of democracy, and even in those countries where this satisfaction
was above 50 per cent, the trust in national government was relatively weak:
only less than 20 per cent of the respondents said that they had a ‘lot of trust’