Electoral participation and satisfaction with democracy in Central and Eastern Europe
Electoral participation and satisfaction with democracy in Central and Eastern Europe (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2025.10028) was written by Filip Kostelka, Lukáš Linek, Jan Rovny, and Michael Škvrňák in 2025.
The authors test the direction of causality between democratic satisfaction and electoral participation. Does satisfaction with democracy drive the decision to vote, or does participation create satisfaction?
The authors analyze the Czech Presidential Election Panel Survey, which was administered online in Czechia over 5 waves; the first wave fielded 2 months before the first round of the 2023 presidential election and the last fielded 5 months after the runoff. This dataset includes 1,501 respondents. The sample was balanced through quotas on age, gender, education, and region.
The authors then create a pool of Central and Eastern European panel datasets with pre- and post-election measurements. Altogether there are 8,126 observations. These cover:
- Czechia
They use logistic (predicted odds of voting) and OLS regressions (predicted change in satisfaction with democracy) to test their hypotheses. Aside from socioeconomic controls (age, gender, education), they also control for other proven predictors of the decision to vote: "feeling that voting is a duty, interest in politics, political knowledge, and party identification".
The estimated coefficients on predictors of the decision to vote are fairly consistent when the first and second rounds of the Czech election are considered separately. Notably women were more likely to vote in the first round, but significance disappears in the second. The authors suggest the candidacy of Danuše Nerudová is the reason; she came in third in the first round and therefore did not qualify for the runoff. Importantly though, there is a negative and significant relationship between pre- (or post-) election satisfaction and the decision to vote.
The authors formulate two different classifications for whether an individual is considered a 'winner' in an election. In the Czech data, they find that participation in the electoral process is a significant predictor of satisfaction, but generally conditioned on being a 'winner' (under any formulation). Fitting the same model on the pooled multinational data leads to similar interpretations for the variables of interest. Notably though, most other predictors lose their significance.