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are indeed universal standards concerning certain desirable goals in any society;
which state would not want to achieve lower crime, infant mortality and rates of
poverty? Nevertheless the selection and operationalization of the core indices, the
relative priority which should be given to each of these, and the exclusion of other
policy dimensions, cannot avoid the ideological nature of any judgements about
government performance. Many central issues in politics also relate less to the overall
goals than the policy means by which to achieve these.
An alternative approach to understanding the influence of policy performance
on system support focuses upon comparing the dynamics of ‘before’ and ‘after’ case
studies of the shocks arising from periods of severe and prolonged economic downturn,
such as the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the 2001 debt crisis in Argentina, or
the 2008 banking crisis in Iceland. Each of these provides potentially important
natural experiments, where the economic performance thesis suggests that after
these shocks, public dissatisfaction with governments and the regime should rise
steeply. The contrary pattern should also be observed where living standards expand
sharply in emerging markets, such as in Vietnam, Taiwan and China, with a sustained
period of economic growth encouraging positive assessments about the performance
of the overall political system. At the same time, there remain grounds
for caution, since certain case studies suggest that economic performance, by itself,
may provide only a poor fit to account for trends in political trust observed in
many countries. Among post-industrial societies, for example, both Italy and Japan
experienced rapid economic growth during the post-war era, although we have
already observed that political disaffection in both countries remains pervasive and
enduring (Morlino and Tarchi 1996; Pharr 2000). Moreover American confidence
in government declined throughout the 1960s, despite the prosperous US economy
during this decade (Lawrence 1997). If the policy performance thesis is correct, then
satisfaction with democracy should be predicted at macro-level by a range of economic
and social policy indicators, and further explained at micro-level by public
satisfaction with economic and political performance.
The choice of policy performance indices is clearly important for the interpretation
of the analysis. There is no consensus about the most appropriate choice of
indices in the research literature, although one of the most comprehensive studies,
by Roller, suggests that any normative criteria for performance effectiveness should
be multidimensional, involving the shared political goals of international security,
domestic security, wealth, socioeconomic security and equality, and environmental
protection (Roller 2005). The most comprehensive strategy therefore suggests
that a wide range of empirical performance indicators should be compared against
democratic satisfaction, first with simple correlation analysis, and then tested more
rigorously through regression models using multiple controls. The literature in evaluation
studies also suggests that subjective perceptions and independent outcome
indices provide the most reliable cross-national measures of regime effectiveness,
reflecting how far public policies achieve, or are perceived to have achieved, commonly
agreed goals, rather than output instruments, such as patterns of govern-
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