Elections Increase Satisfaction With Democracy

A large literature shows that election outcomes affect satisfaction with democracy by separating voters into winners and losers. Moving beyond victory and defeat, I theorize that elections themselves boost satisfaction due to the psychosocial, representational, and economic utility they provide to citizens. I test my expectations across three separate studies. These leverage survey fieldwork that was interrupted by elections in several countries (Study 1), cross-national panel survey data (Study 2), and a survey experiment (Study 3). The timing of survey interviews in each study helps isolate the impact of elections from that of winning and losing in the sense of a voter’s party entering government. Results together show that elections increase satisfaction with democracy, and an investigation of the theoretical mechanisms suggests that this relationship is driven by the representational and economic benefits of elections.