Katsourides, YiannosIoannidis, Nikandros2025-09-302025-09-302025Katsourides Y, Ioannidis N. Intra-party leadership contests and effect on levels of satisfaction with democracy on party voters. Government and Opposition. 2025 Jul;60(3):872-93. DOI: 10.1017/gov.2024.270017-257Xhttp://hdl.handle.net/10230/71310This article investigates the relationship between intra-party leadership contestations on levels of satisfaction with democracy among party voters, trying to identify the impact of the former on the latter. The article draws on empirical data for a cross-sectional analysis from three different data sets that cover 11 countries, including a more case-specific analysis that utilizes panel data from Germany. Overall, the study aims to capture the dynamics of intra-party politics and the magnitude of its effect on perceptions of democracy among parties' voters. We find that intra-party politics at its probably most competitive version, that is elections for the head of the party, does not seem to exercise any significant influence on voters' satisfaction with democracy.application/pdfeng© The Author(s), 2024. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1017/gov.2024.27Political partiesDemocracyIntra-party electionsParty leadersCompetitivenessinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess