ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter analyses the relationship between economic conditions and support for democracy.1 While this is an often-researched topic (Cordova and Seligson, 2009; Huang et al., 2008; Mishler and Rose, 1999), we believe that the current economic crisis, one of the most significant in several decades, requires a new look at the effects of economic crises on support for democracy. Previous research has shown that the economic context has a strong effect on different aspects of the political domain: political legitimacy depends, in part, on the economic performance of the regime (Booth and Seligson, 2009; Norris, 1999), support for democracy is increased by citizens’ positive evaluations of economic performance (Kitschelt, 1992), and confidence in political institutions rises and falls with the economy (Mishler and Rose, 1997). Given that previous studies have analysed different components of the political system, starting from Easton’s model of support for the political system (Dalton, 1999; Easton, 1965), the approach we are using in this chapter is to distinguish between different components of support for democracy, ranging from specific support (confidence in different types of political actors), to middlerange support (confidence in political institutions, satisfaction with the functioning of democracy), to diffuse support (support for democracy as a principle). We treat each of these components as separate outcome variables in models that include the same set of independent variables. By analysing each component of political support separately and comparing the results, we are able to test whether economic crises decrease support for democracy across the board, or if only certain components of support for democracy are eroded during economic crises, while others are immune to such short-term influences. We analyse here the effect of an economic crisis on support for democracy in the case of Romanian society. There are three main reasons for choosing Romania. First, Romania combines two characteristics that have been indicated as having a possible effect on support for democracy: it is a rather fragile, not yet fully consolidated democracy and, at the same time, it is a country that has felt quite strongly the effects of the current economic crisis. Second, while Romanians have experienced other periods of economic turmoil, these were the
result of adjustments required during the transformation of a state economy into a market economy. The current economic crisis in Romania is the first that cannot be attributed to the post-communist transition process and, as a result, people may be less inclined to quietly accept its negative consequences. We use, thus, Romania as a case study to formulate possible hypotheses, which will be tested later in comparative analyses. Lastly, in analysing the Romanian case, we had the opportunity to use an ongoing panel study (the Romanian Elections Study (RES)) that covers almost four years and that allows us to test our hypotheses regarding the effects of changing economic conditions on support for democracy. The panel study has three waves, which include both the presidential elections of 2009 and the parliamentary elections of 2012. As we argue below, the waves of our panel study capture the largest part of the economic crisis that affected Romania from 2009 to the present time. Using the panel data, we estimated identical models for each component of support for the political regime we are taking into account (confidence in the presidency, confidence in political parties, confidence in political institutions, satisfaction with the way democracy works, and support for democracy as a political regime), placing the focus on evaluations of economic performance (prospective/retrospective, egocentric/ sociotropic) while controlling for socio-demographic characteristics and other variables shown in previous studies to have a significant effect on support for democracy. Without going into the details presented in the results section, we will mention here that according to the models we estimated, evaluations of economic performance do play a significant role in some dimensions of support for the political regime, the effect being stronger in the case of middle-range support and not significantly different from zero in the case of diffuse support. Our main contribution to the literature comes from a combination of the substantive and methodological characteristics of our study. Methodologically, the use of panel data allows us to make a stronger argument regarding the significant effects of evaluations of economic performance on support for democracy. More important, however, is the fact that we tested the relationship between the two in Romania, a case that is representative of Central and Eastern European postcommunist countries at a specific moment in time, that is, at the exact time the first post-transition economic crisis affected a country that, by all indicators, ended the democratic transition and yet did not become a fully consolidated democracy. If economic turmoil during the post-communist transition could be explained away by politicians as an inherent part of the transition process, this economic crisis could not benefit from such an explanation. Our main finding that the economic crisis negatively affected specific forms of support but failed to affect diffuse support for democracy is encouraging, suggesting that the democratic system is not easily disturbed, even in a democracy that is still insufficiently consolidated.
