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Governance Quality, Fairness Perceptions, and Satisfaction with Democracy in Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2021

Gregory W. Saxton Open the ORCID record for Gregory W. Saxton [Opens in a new window]
Gregory W. Saxton*
Affiliation:
Gregory W. Saxton is a visiting assistant professor of political science at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, USA. gregory.saxton@ttu.edu.
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Abstract

How do individuals’ fairness judgments affect their political evaluations? This article argues that when citizens perceive high levels of distributive unfairness in society, they will be less satisfied with the way democracy functions. Yet good governance—that is, impartiality in the exercise of political authority—should mitigate the negative influence of perceived distributive unfairness on satisfaction. Using a cross-national analysis of 18 Latin American countries from 2011 to 2015, this study demonstrates that individuals are significantly less satisfied with democracy when they perceive their country’s income distribution as unfair. Yet good governance significantly offsets this negative relationship, even in a region with the highest level of inequality in the world. These findings imply that policymakers can bolster democratic satisfaction, even in places where citizens perceive the income distribution as fundamentally unfair, by committing to good governance and fair democratic procedures.

Keywords

satisfaction with democracygovernancecorruptioninequalitydistributive fairness
Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Politics and Society , Volume 63 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 122 - 145
Copyright
© The Author, 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the University of Miami

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Footnotes

Conflict of interest: I, Gregory W. Saxton, declare no conflict of interest.

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