Abstract

In times of recession people tend to lose confidence in the government and in other state institutions. Political scientists have pointed out that loss of faith in a particular government or parliament does not necessarily mean declining support for democracy as a system of government. However, the recent recession has been unusually severe and long-lasting and some countries have still not recovered. It is an open question whether support for democracy is so resilient that it can even weather exceptionally serious economic crises such as the post-2008 one. As usual, young people were most affected by the crisis and we may thus expect this age group to show the steepest drop in institutional confidence. This chapter examines the impact of the recession on young people's satisfaction with democratic politics across the Western world. Drawing on Pippa Norris's conceptual framework for studying political support, a distinction is made between three dimensions of political satisfaction: satisfaction with regime institutions, with regime performance, and with regime principles. While satisfaction with regime institutions represents support for a specific government or parliament, regime principles refers to support for democratic government as such. Satisfaction with regime performance concerns evaluations of how the democratic system functions in practice. The chapter uses European Social Survey (ESS), Eurobarometer, and World Values Survey (WVS) data to analyze short- and long-term trends in the dimensions of political satisfaction and to correlate political satisfaction with economic performance indicators. The findings suggest that young people's support for regime institutions and evaluations of regime performance were lowest in countries with the highest levels of youth unemployment. These countries also showed the most dramatic declines in these two dimensions of political satisfaction. Support for regime principles is, however, not connected to indices of economic performance, suggesting that the crisis has not undermined the public legitimacy of democracy. However, young people's support for regime principles declined across the board, which sets them apart from older generations who showed stable or rising levels of support for regime principles. In some countries this decline started a long time before the recent crisis happened, indicating that it may have been caused by more fundamental and enduring processes such as rising inequality, declining intergenerational social mobility, growing job precariousness, and the declining demographic and political clout of young people.