Economic Evaluations, Procedural Fairness, and Satisfaction with Democracy

What is it about?

Political support is affected by economic performance. When economic conditions improve, or are perceived to improve, people become more satisfied with the way democracy works in their country. But people don't just care about outcomes. They also care how fair democratic institutions are perceived to be. Besides, the extent to which people judge the system on the basis of tangible outcomes is also affected by procedural fairness: when they perceive the system to be fair, they care less about economic outcomes. This is shown for the European countries included in the European Social Survey's round 6.

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Why is it important?

The main contribution of the article is to expand to the "macro-political" setting an hypothesis that has been confirmed many times in the context of organisational and social psychology studies: a process-outcome interaction, through which fair processes moderate the effect of beneficial outcomes in people's satisfaction.

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