MAPLE investigates the salience and polarisation of the European issue, in the media, during electoral campaigns, and in parliamentary debates, in Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. This set of surveys was carried out in the six countries simultaneously in a two-wave panel in each country. The first wave occurred in January 2019 and the second wave occurred in June 2019. The surveys are drawn from qualtrics online panelsl and they follow a three crossed-quota design based on age (three categories), education (three categories) and gender (two categories). The study includes questions on attitudes towards the European Union and national politics, as well as political behavior. Wave 1 of the panel also includes a conjoint experiment where respondents were asked to choose among different parties, based on a number of characteristics which were randomly assigned to parties. Wave 2 was carried out following the European Parliament Elections and includes a repetition of the questions in Wave 1 as well as several questions pertaining to vote recall for the EP elections.

Satisfaction with democracy (SWD) is a commonly used indicator, and its determinants have been analysed extensively. But what does dissatisfaction with democracy substantially mean? This paper tests if satisfaction is actually a coherent consequence of citizens considering democratic supply and demand. It starts from the simple idea that satisfaction can be explained by the distance between what “should be” and what “is”; between democratic expectations and reality. I capture this idea in a spatial model of democratic support, where size and direction of the gap between citizens’ expectations and evaluations of democracy determine levels of satisfaction. I use data for 26 countries from the European Social Survey. Taking into account both expectation-surplus and evaluations-surplus gaps, I find that satisfaction is affected by both the size and the direction of the distance between expectations and evaluations. The main finding is that liberal criteria of democratic quality are generally agreed upon amongst citizens, and that a perceived lack of their realization is the strongest predictor of dissatisfaction. Democratic input dimensions like direct participation and output criteria like social justice are more disputed, and create dissatisfaction amongst those wanting more of them as well as those wanting less.

Satisfaction with democracy (SWD) is a commonly used indicator, and its determinants have been analysed extensively. But what does dissatisfaction with democracy substantially mean? This paper tests if satisfaction is actually a coherent consequence of citizens considering democratic supply and demand. It starts from the simple idea that satisfaction can be explained by the distance between what “should be” and what “is”; between democratic expectations and reality. I capture this idea in a spatial model of democratic support, where size and direction of the gap between citizens’ expectations and evaluations of democracy determine levels of satisfaction. I use data for 26 countries from the European Social Survey. Taking into account both expectation-surplus and evaluations-surplus gaps, I find that satisfaction is affected by both the size and the direction of the distance between expectations and evaluations. The main finding is that liberal criteria of democratic quality are generally agreed upon amongst citizens, and that a perceived lack of their realization is the strongest predictor of dissatisfaction. Democratic input dimensions like direct participation and output criteria like social justice are more disputed, and create dissatisfaction amongst those wanting more of them as well as those wanting less.