Our World
in Data
Oxford Martin School logoUniversity of Oxford logoGlobal Change Data Lab logo
Data

Citizen satisfaction with democracy

See all data and research on:
Democracy

What you should know about this indicator

  • An examples of a survey questions is: 'On the whole, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the way democracy works in [own country]?'
  • Responses above the median were considered as satisfaction with democracy. Dissatisfied respondents may have actively expressed dissatisfaction with democracy, may have given an indifferent answer, may have answered "I don't know", or may not have responded at all.
  • Higher scores indicate more satisfaction. Positive scores mean that citizen satisfaction with democracy is higher than the average across all countries and years. A score of 1 means that citizen support lies one standard deviation above the average support."
Citizen satisfaction with democracy
Central estimate of the average extent to which citizens are satisfied with democracy in their own country. It combines responses across more than one thousand nationally-representative surveys on how citizens' satisfaction with democracy.
Source
Claassen (2022) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 22, 2024
Next expected update
May 2025
Date range
1973–2020

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Democratic satisfaction measures the extent to which the public of a given country is satisfied with the “way democracy works” in their country. Some scholars treat satisfaction as akin to democratic support; others use it as a summary measure of political support; yet others regard it as capturing an instrumental or performance-based appraisal of the regime. Whatever the interpretation, democratic satisfaction is widely used in cross-national opinion research.

It is measured by applying a Bayesian latent variable model to aggregated survey data from a wide variety of cross-national survey projects, covering 132 countries from as early as 1973 until 2020.

The Bayesian model is the same as that used to measure democratic mood (http://doi.org/10.1017/pan.2018.32). Earlier satisfaction estimates are used in this article. This choropleth shows democratic satisfaction in 2020.

Retrieved on
May 22, 2024
Retrieved from
http://chrisclaassen.com/data.html
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Claassen C. Estimating Smooth Country–Year Panels of Public Opinion. Political Analysis. 2019;27(1):1-20. doi:10.1017/pan.2018.32

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

The variable matches Claassen's variable satis.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Citizen satisfaction with democracy”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2013) - “Democracy”. Data adapted from Claassen. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/citizen-satisfaction-with-democracy [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Claassen (2022) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

Claassen (2022) – processed by Our World in Data. “Citizen satisfaction with democracy” [dataset]. Claassen, “Democratic Satisfaction” [original data]. Retrieved May 8, 2025 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/citizen-satisfaction-with-democracy
OSZAR »