Procedures Matter: Strong Voice, Evaluations of Policy Performance, and Regime Support
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321720903813 |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720903813
Political Studies
2021, Vol. 69(2) 412 –433
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720903813
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Procedures Matter: Strong
Voice, Evaluations of Policy
Performance, and Regime
Support
Matthew Rhodes-Purdy
Abstract
Many scholars assume that policy performance determines popular support for political systems.
Yet in the wake of recent economic crises, patterns of performance and regime support have
diverged in many countries, and popular perceptions of performance often fail to reflect the
actual quality of governance. To resolve these paradoxes, I draw on recent scholarship on regime
support and procedural fairness. I show that strong voice (the ability of citizens to influence
political outcomes and a key element of procedural justice in democracies) influences regime
support in a way not accounted for in this literature: by moderating the relationship between
policy performance and perceptions of performance. These findings show that people will evaluate
equivalent outcomes more favorably if they are produced using fair procedures. As performance
has long been shown to positively influence support, procedural justice has an additional, indirect
influence on people’s attitudes toward political systems.
Keywords
regime support, procedural justice, policy performance, regime-based efficacy, voice
Accepted: 13 January 2020
A cursory glance yields cases from across the globe where chasms exist between govern-
ment performance and popular perceptions of it. In the run-up to the 2016 presidential
election in the United States, Donald Trump was able to convince many that the country
was in terminal decline, despite a robust recovery. Violent antigovernment protests have
erupted once again in Chile, even as the country was feted for its accomplishments in
economic and social development. Prior to his death, Venezuelans took to the streets to
defend the regime of Hugo Chávez, even as his government’s authoritarian leanings and
staggering incompetence became undeniable. In Europe, Greek and Spanish voters
crushed under the weight of unfolding economic catastrophe and the inflexibility of
Department of Political Science, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA
Corresponding author:
Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, Department of Political Science, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-0002, USA.
Email: Mhrhode@clemson.edu
903813PSX0010.1177/0032321720903813Political StudiesRhodes-Purdy
research-article2020
Article
Rhodes-Purdy 413
European institutions, rebelled against establishment parties by voting for populist move-
ments SYRIZA and Podemos. Meanwhile, voters in France and Portugal, equally harmed
by the crisis, rejected outsiders and maintained support for their political systems.
Why so many discrepancies? Since Lipset (1963, ch. 3), many scholars have assumed
that policy performance is the primary cause of system support and perceptions of legiti-
macy. Although this scholarship has made great contributions, it is less able to explain
cases in which support and performance do not match, or where similar failures of gov-
ernance produce radically different changes in systemic support.
Thankfully, several scholars have derived from the study of organizational justice a rela-
tively simple argument that individuals evaluate organizations not only on the quality of the
decisions they make, but also on how they make those decisions. Adding to a wave of recent
scholarship inspired by this notion, I argue that when democratic procedures fail to empower
their citizens, those citizens will turn against political systems over even the most modest
failures. Conversely, citizens who perceive democratic politics as granting them control of
their fates will remain loyal, even in the face of economic and social turmoil.
This article continues to develop and expand this new framework in three ways. First,
it refines and advances existing theories of procedural justice and regime support. It does
this both by synthesizing existing theory into a unified framework, and by focusing on a
new element of procedural justice: opportunities for citizens to influence political out-
comes in legally binding ways, which I call “strong voice.” Second, it identifies addi-
tional mechanisms by which procedural issues can influence support. Recent scholarship
has found that procedural justice can influence support directly, and by moderating the
effect of policy performance evaluations and national-level economic factors on support.
In this piece, I argue that procedural justice has a further effect on regime support: chang-
ing how individuals evaluate policy outcomes in the first place. When procedures are just,
people will more favorably evaluate outcomes (or be more forgiving of failures) than if
they are not. In other words, identical government performance can result in radically
divergent subjective evaluations of performance, depending on the fairness of regime
processes. A chart of this new framework of support, with existing works and relation-
ships to be tested here marked, is presented in Figure 1.
The final contribution made here is to expand this framework beyond its roots in European
politics to the Americas. I use data from the 2012 wave of the AmericasBarometer (Latin
American Public Opinion Project, LAPOP) study,1 and experimental data collected through
Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk (Mturk) platform in the United States. I use LAPOP data to
estimate the parameters of a simultaneous structural equation model (SEM) to evaluate the
influence of perceived strong voice (operationalized as regime-based efficacy, RBE) on per-
ceived performance (H3). I also analyze experimental data from the United States to test the
effect of procedural justice (operationalized here as strong voice) on evaluations of policy
performance, both directly (H2) and as mediated through RBE (H1).
Defining Regime Support
Before going any further, it is necessary to define what I mean by regime support. The
main source of confusion here is whether regime support is an example of “diffuse” or
“specific” support. Easton (1975: 436) used the term specific support to refer to concrete
empirical objects such as actual policies, leaders, and so on; he theorized that this type of
support would vary considerably as circumstances changed. He saw diffuse support as
pertaining to more abstract elements of the political system. Easton explicitly included
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