Perceived governing competence and ideological alignment: Democratic satisfaction in Japan’s one-party dominant system

This study examines how dominant-party systems reshape the criteria by which citizens evaluate democratic performance, drawing on Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Wave 5 data from Japan. It is argued that when electoral alternation is structurally foreclosed, a single structural condition reconfigures two standard relationships. Perceived governing competence appears to displace electoral outcomes as the primary basis for democratic satisfaction, with this effect significantly stronger among ruling party supporters than opposition voters. The standard relationship between ideological distance and satisfaction appears to be inverted, such that a wider gap between the governing and opposition parties signals unresolvable conflict rather than meaningful choice, while a narrower gap signals workable accountability. These findings suggest that dominant-party systems sustain democratic satisfaction through performance-based evaluation rather than procedural competition and that the criteria of democratic legitimacy may themselves be shaped by the structural conditions under which citizens evaluate them.