UNDERSTANDING SATISFACTION WITH DEMOCRACY: AN INSTITUTIONAL AND ETHNIC EXPLANATION IN EIGHT POST-COMMUNIST COUNTRIES

Satisfaction with democracy is normally explained using individual socio-demographic variables. In this paper, I show that another important set of variables is also key to understanding this phenomenon. I argue that the influence of those institutions acquired to implement a liberal democracy will play a key role to understand the issue at stake. I test two different hypotheses. The first one refers to the institutional design. If the resulting institutions that a country adopts only defend and reflect the interests of the majority group of the population, then we can expect that members of minority groups will value democracy very low. The second hypothesis refers to the degree of accommodation that these countries have adopted towards their minorities. In this sense, when the level of accommodation is very high, satisfaction with democracy should also be high. These two hypotheses are very closely linked and allow us to test under what type of institutions and under what degree of accommodation are we more likely to find the higher values of satisfaction with democracy