Change You Can Believe In? The Impact of Government Proposals for Electoral Reform on Satisfaction With Democracy in the Aftermath of the Economic Crisis

A recent study by Bowler and Donovan (2013) suggests that changes to electoral rules have a limited capacity to build voter efficacy and public trust in democratic institutions. Underscoring this work is an argument that parties pursue reforms for largely self-interested reasons but frequently advance reform proposals using rhetoric that emphasizes valence issues of fairness, participation and trust in order to appeal to public opinion. Similarly, limited voter knowledge towards the specific rules of government may also explain the limited effects of reform. Thus citizens may support electoral change as a means of punishing politicians following scandals (Renwick et al, 2011) or to signal discontent over the economy (Bowler and Donovan, 2013, p34) rather than as a meaningful response to the evaluation of alternative electoral arrangements. Consequently, this paper asks if government proposals for electoral reform (as opposed to actual reform efforts) affect public satisfaction with democracy? Scholarship on regime support suggests that public satisfaction depends on evaluations of government performance (e.g. economic performance) and on perceptions of the procedural ‘fairness’ and responsiveness of institutions in translating voter preferences into policy. Therefore, these two models are closely linked, since, when parties are faced with poor economic performance they may attempt to compensate by appealing to the public with the promise of procedural change. This raises the question then, of to what extent (if at all), reform promises increase satisfaction with democracy? The economic crisis offers a unique opportunity to address this question, since the on-going economic downturn has generated discussions for political reform in several European countries. This paper explores the effects of reform proposals using information from the Comparative Manifestos Project to measure proposals for electoral reform in West European democracies and cross-national survey data from the Eurobarometer (2008-2012) to measure satisfaction with democracy.