Citizen Experiences and their Impact on Confidence in Political Authorities and Institutions

• In Event: Citizens and Beliefs: Ideology and Public Opinion in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Experiences with democracy can vary significantly, depending on socioeconomic status, ethnic, cultural, and citizenship backgrounds. They may also differ depending on which level of government citizens are interacting with when engaging or accessing services. Each government can offer unique benefits and supports or enforce different restrictions on citizens’ rights or freedoms. Scarce resources, diverse demands, and unanticipated events also present challenges for governments when responding to public demands and delivering outputs to citizens. What do citizens think about the ways in which their democracies are coping with such complexities and responding to demands and expectations? How do citizens’ direct experiences with their democratic systems influence their assessments of the governance they receive and how well they perceive their democracies to be working for them? How do evaluations of these experiences compare to individual standards for ‘good’ or ‘acceptable’ performance?
In this paper, a cross-national, cross-disciplinary team from Canada, the US, the UK, and Poland, explores these questions using public opinion data gathered across each of these four democracies. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect that citizens’ individual experiences with democratic outputs (received from across all levels of government) can have on political and democratic support - measuring the effect of evaluations of such experiences on levels of confidence in political authorities (including both leaders and elected representatives) and political institutions (including both governments and legislatures).
Employing public opinion data drawn from the most recent waves of the Political Communities Survey Project (PCSP) collected in 2023-24, this paper digs into the ways in which citizens in these diverse democracies experience their political systems and the outputs of these systems: the taxes citizens pay to different governments, the benefits and services that they receive, individual perceptions of improvement or stagnation in their own quality of life and well-being, and citizens’ assessments of the interactions they have with various specific political and non-political authorities and democratic institutions. These analyses also explore the impact that each of these experiences have in shaping public confidence in democratic authorities and institutions across these societies, as well as sub-nationally across levels of government. This study employs a new approach to understanding attitudes and perceptions of cross-national political systems by also bench-marking assessments against unique individual performance assessment standards. This approach offers important new insights into the way we might collect and interpret public opinion data and make performance generalizations, particularly when assessing public evaluations of democratic performance across diverse contexts.

Authors

• Mebs Kanji, Concordia University

• Kerry Tannahill, KiND Institute

• Sophie Courchesne, Concordia University

• Thomas Bryer, University of Central Florida

• Jo Crotty, University of Sunderland

• Victoria Foster, Edge Hill University

• Piotr Modzelewski, University of Warsaw

• Sofia Rivera Prysmakova, Kennesaw State University