From Problems to Solutions? Interpretations of the Main Flaws of the Political System and Support for Institutional Reform

It is now well established in the literature on process preferences that dissatisfaction with the functioning of the political system and the status of ‘loser’ of representative democracy are associated with higher support for different institutional mechanisms, such as direct democracy, sortition, or even more authoritarian alternatives (Bowler et Donovan 2019; Malka et al. 2022; Pilet et al. 2023; Rojon et al. 2023). Does the opposition to the status quo embodied by representative democracy imply support for any alternative to the current institutional order, or does the interpretation of the main shortcomings of the current system influence the type of mechanisms supported? This is the research question addressed in this paper. Our paper is based on an original survey module conducted in France in 2023 by the ISSP. Inspired by a ‘problem-based approach’ (Warren 2017) to support for institutional reform, it was developed thanks to the inductive analysis of a series of qualitative interviews. We examine whether interpretations of the main flaws of the institutional system (such as the failures of the political class, of French citizens, or the unsatisfactory distribution of power) can be linked to support for six institutional mechanisms with different logics and degrees of radicalism, including several that, to the best of our knowledge, have never been tested in surveys. Two of them relate to the renewal of the representative link (quotas to improve descriptive representation and term limits), two to the control of political elites (recall, and the obligation to pay elected representatives with the average national salary), and the final two to the shift of the balance of power from politicians to citizens (citizen- initiated referendums, and the replacement of elected representatives by citizens selected by lot). Our analysis is based on a multiple correspondence analysis, which allows us to analyse inductively which problems are related to which solutions. We then move to a series of ordered logit models to analyse more precisely how problem interpretations are related to a series of solutions, controlling for the main variables already identified in the literature. Our main result is that, apart from opposition to the status quo and the sociodemographic variables influencing preferences for institutional reform, the interpretation of the main flaws of the institutional system has an impact on the solutions favoured by citizens to fix it.