Voting and satisfaction with democracy in flexible-list PR

A vast literature shows that voting for the winning party in elections boosts satisfaction with democracy. But in many list PR systems, voters do not only vote for a party, they can also vote for candidates within parties. Yet, we know very little about how such votes affect voters' satisfaction with democracy. In this paper, we analyse pre- and post-election panel survey data from Belgium, in which we asked respondents to report their vote choice for parties and for candidates. The main finding is that casting a preference vote for a winning candidate makes little difference, as party-list vo... Mehr ...