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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’
