The degree of satisfaction with democracy is a crucial indicator for the diffuse support of a country’s political system without which it would not be able to function and survive. Hence, there is a lot of research on factors influencing satisfaction with democracy, which can be divided into three strands focusing on different kinds of explanations: First, individual level factors (e.g. social trust), second, factors on the systemic level (e.g. the responsiveness of political actors) and, third, analyses of the course of aggregated satisfaction with democracy over time which can be explained by events such as political and economic crises. Still, especially with regard to individual and systemic factors on the hand and events on the other there is a lack of links between the two types of analyses. Consequently, it remains unclear, why events have an effect on satisfaction with democracy, hence if this effect is due to changes in of individual and systemic factors or their relative effects on satisfaction with democracy. The proposed paper fills this gap by taking the recent world-wide financial and economic crisis as case under study and by examining the influence of individual and systemic factors on satisfaction with democracy before (2008) and during the crisis (2010) in more than 20 countries. The data used are Round 4 (2008) and 5 (2010) of the European Social Survey (ESS) which are supplemented by information on systemic factors from the Democracy Cross-National Data base. With this data multilevel regression analyses are performed, incorporating interaction effects between explanatory variables and time. Thus, the proposed paper adds to our understanding of influences on satisfaction with democracy, especially with regard to the interplay between individual as well as systemic factors and the political and economic context.
