The Institutional Roots of Citizens' Satisfaction with Local Democracy (the Netherlands, 2016)

Citizens' satisfaction with local democracy is a core indicator of political support. Yet, the local roots of local democratic satisfaction have remained rather unclear. On the one hand, local democratic satisfaction may be primarily the result of local considerations of input legitimacy (such as the openness of the system to citizen input), throughput legitimacy (along values such as representation, deliberation, inclusiveness, and rule of law), and output legitimacy (i.e., satisfaction with local policy performance). On the other hand, others have argued that local democratic satisfaction is primarily and exponent of satisfaction with democracy at the national level, particularly in rather centralized countries. Moreover, the relevance of these explanations might itself be conditional on the local engagement and values of citizens. This paper employs a large set of survey question batteries in the Dutch Local Election Survey 2016 to test these rivaling explanations of local democratic satisfaction. We show that democratic satisfaction varies quite little across municipalities and social groups. To the extent that local democratic satisfaction is driven by local considerations, perceptions of output tend to matter most. Yet, local democratic satisfaction is explained considerably better by national considerations. We discuss the implications of both sets of findings.