Democracy in Crisis? The Declining Support for Democracy in European Countries 2006-2011

Klaus Armingeon & Kai Guthmann The global financial crisis which started in 2007 in the US turned into an economic crisis in 2008. In many European countries, this triggered severe sovereign debt crises since spring 2010, often followed by the implementation of tough austerity programs—with countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Hungary, Romania and the Baltic states representing the most prominent examples. In large part, these austerity measures were imposed in interaction between inter- und supranational organizations (IMF, EU) and national governments. Parliaments were under strong pressure to accept these deals while citizens were not asked at all. It did not make much difference for the fiscal and social policies agreed upon in the memorandums of understanding between IMF, EU and national governments whether citizens voted the pervious government out of office, whether parliamentary parties co-operated or antagonized each other, whether social partners co-operated or waged general strikes, whether citizens went on demonstration or stayed at home—in the end people had to accept the deals. In other words, democratic discourse was ineffective. What effect did this temporary hollowing-out of national democratic procedures have on the support for democracy by ordinary citizens? This is the guiding question of our paper. It is of particular importance since in some countries the share of politically sophisticated citizens is comparatively small—and this is frequently the case in those countries that had to implement the toughest austerity programs. There is some evidence that the various types of economic crisis and austerity plans triggered political unrest in some parts of Europe and also the US. The ‘indignados’ in Spain, Portugal and Greece or the ‘occupy Wallstreet’-movement starting in the US and spreading to European cities such as Zurich, Frankfurt, Berlin and Rome signalled increasing unease with the way national democracy is working. Notwithstanding this mobilization of some, the plurality of citizens in both the North and the South did not join demonstrations. Do they share the negative evaluations of the political system by the activists? Is their support for the democratic system receding? We will base our analysis on several Eurobarometer surveys conducted during the different stages of the crisis between 2007 and 2011, which contain a list of variables that would indicate democratic support in its various dimensions. Generally, we would aim to distinguish three dimensions of democratic support: (i) support for democratic values/principles, (ii) satisfaction with the way democracy is currently working (performance), and (iii) trust in political institutions and actors. Unfortunately, however, for the most recent stages of the European sovereign debt crisis in late 2010 and early 2011, available survey data so far is insufficient to systematically cover all three dimensions. Therefore, in this first version of the paper we will restrict our analysis to measuring support one-dimensionally as trust in national parliaments, serving as a proxy especially for people’s satisfaction with the way democracy is working in their country (the two variables display a highly significant correlation of at least ~0.4 in previous surveys). We will explain variation in trust in national parliaments/support for democracy (i) over time (pre-crisis period 2006/2007, mainly financial crisis period 2008; economic/sovereign debt crisis period 2010/2011), (ii) between nations that had or had not to implement imposed and tough austerity measures, (iii) between citizens with regard to their level of political sophistication. We will control for the standard macro- and micro-level factors that are systematically correlated with the dependent variable. Our working hypotheses are that there is a decline of support for democracy if: 1) there is a crisis of the real economy (recession/high unemployment) and a sovereign debt crisis (using government bond yields/spreads as a proxy). If such crises are occurring, national governments and parliaments could not realize their standard pledges to steer the economy and avoid slashing the welfare state. 2) a country has to implement a tough austerity program that was designed in the interaction between national government, IMF and EU. In these cases the national people have temporarily lost their capacity to rule themselves. 3) citizens are weakly sophisticated with regard to democratic political participation. We measure sophistication with an index developed by Buehlmann and Kriesi (2006). Given all three conditions (economic and sovereign debt crisis, imposed austerity, little sophistication) the support of democracy is expected to have dwindled to such an extent that it might endanger the working of national democracy today and in the future. In methodological terms we assume that citizens are nested in different macro-economic contexts (i.e. severe sovereign debt/economic crisis vs. moderate crisis vs. no/minor crisis) and will run a two-level multi-level analysis for each of the time periods under consideration.