Political Parties, Partisanship,and Support for the Political System in Established Democracies.

Although existing research has identified important system-level explanations of cross-national differences in the levels of political support, a lot of unexplained variation remains within countries across similarly situated citizens. This study is designed to show that the role political parties play in shaping people?s views about the political system is a missing reality in the research on political trust. We argue that political parties shape people?s views about the democratic governance by generating party identification, and that partisanship operates on system support in two important ways. First, it stimulates citizen attachment to a political system; and second, it provides an important link between parties and citizens that facilitates a more effective channeling of party views to their supporters. Drawing on the survey data collected as part of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project together with the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) data and Laver and Hunt (1992) expert surveys in eight established democracies, we find that party identifiers have more positive views about their political regime than unaligned citizens. What is more, the results of non-recursive two-stage least-squares model indicate that parties with more optimistic outlook towards the system produce higher levels of satisfaction with democracy and external efficacy among their supporters than parties with more dim views. We also find that office-seeking parties express more satisfaction with the status quo of the political regime and thus produce more positive attitudes among their supporters. This suggests that office-seeking party behavior appears to play a more favorable role for the democratic governance than has often been assumed by students of democratic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]