Does the democratic performance really matter for regime support? Evidence from the post-communist Member States of the European Union

Abstract

The democratic performance is declining across a number of Central and Eastern European Member States of the European Union, this while regime support has seemingly been steadily increasing. This dual development leads to questions regarding whether the democratic performance actually matters for regime support within a region consisting of countries that are still being considered as relatively new democracies. The findings from this study shows that there is a negative connection between higher levels of democratic performance and regime support within the countries in this region during the period of 2004-2019. Nonetheless, higher levels of democratic performance are still related to higher levels of regime support across the region.