Génération Désenchantée: Satisfaction with Democracy and Income Inequality

Recent scholarship offers compelling evidence on the negative impact of income inequality on satisfaction with democracy. This article studies whether the impact of inequality on evaluations of the democratic process varies for different groups in the population and over time. The central argument is that the impact of inequality is conditional on individual characteristics and experience. Young adults and members of the 1990s generation should be more sensitive to income inequality compared to older generations. To answer this question, we use cumulative six-wave data from the European Social Survey (2002-2012), matched with income inequality estimates from the Standardized World Income Inequality Dataset (2014). Results from a series of mixed effects models reveal that higher levels of income inequality are associated with lower levels of satisfaction with democracy, but with a disproportionate negative influence on young adults compared to older citizens and also on the 1990s cohort compared to all other cohorts.