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How durably do people accept democracy? Politicization, political attitudes and losers’ consent in France

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French Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

From 1981 to today, diffuse support for democratic principles has remained stable with high scores, whereas support for specific forms of democracy has been much lower and largely dependent on the year considered. On the basis of the four waves of the French European Values Study data (from 1981 to 2008), this article investigates the influence of different political factors on attachment or support for democracy by testing three different hypotheses: first, the level and the type of politicization affects opinions on democracy. Second, high expectations of democracy negatively affect specific support for democracy. Third, the ‘losers’ consent’ effect means that political opposition to the government turns into dissatisfaction with democracy but does not affect support for general democratic principles. Our results partly confirm the first two hypotheses and provide evidence that the losers’ consent effect is a relevant factor to explain variations in specific forms of support for democracy.

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Notes

  1. In the French literature, some loser consent mechanisms have already been analyzed by Abrial and Greffet (1998) r by Magni Berton (2010). But no systematic test has been undertaken.

  2. We chose to dichotomize this variable mainly for two reasons. First, the way the items are devised for this question in the EVS aims to offer nuanced answers in order to avoid forcing people to give an answer that could be considered as excessive. Second, we wanted to have a four-position scale in which every degree indicates the number of institutions people have confidence in. On a 0–9 scale (that we would obtain by maintaining the four items of each variable), we could not distinguish within middle positions between those who have great confidence in one institution and not at all in the others and those who have little trust in any of them. All our scales are built in this way for the same reasons.

  3. The direct question on the highest level of education was absent in 1981.

  4. Rigorously speaking, we should have to carry out an ordered model with an estimation based on maximum log-likelihood because the scales are ordered variables taking four or five growing values. However, we can also assume them to be interval-level dependent variables so the results would be much easier to interpret. Fundamentally, the results do not change in either estimation.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sandrine Astor for her helpful work on data, Céline Belot, Bruno Cautrès and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and Anna Jeannesson for her work on the text. Any remaining errors are ours.

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Correspondence to Nathalie Dompnier.

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Dompnier, N., Berton, R. How durably do people accept democracy? Politicization, political attitudes and losers’ consent in France. Fr Polit 10, 323–344 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/fp.2012.20

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