Over the past four decades, citizens of democracies all over the world have lost faith in their governments. Here in Australia, we've been blissfully oblivious. But recently, we've caught the disease.

And now that we have it, we're not at all sure how to get rid of it.

After the 2016 federal election, Australians were the least satisfied with our democratic system at any time since the Whitlam dismissal in 1975. My fellow political scientists and I thought that the hung parliament of 2010 had driven Australian voters to contemporary lows in political satisfaction. We were wrong.

Following that year's election, crossbench members of the House of Representatives took 17 days to confirm their support for Julia Gillard to form a Labor-controlled minority government.

In contrast, Western European democracies regularly take weeks or months following an election to decide governing coalitions.

In Australia, 17 days of mild confusion was enough for the percentage of citizens expressing support for our democratic system to fall from 86 per cent in 2007 to 72 per cent in 2010. Australians believing that people in government can be trusted fell from 43 to 37 per cent.

The hung parliament experience of 2010 seems to have kicked off this malaise among Australian voters, but the two subsequent elections have perpetuated it.

Satisfaction in leaders never above 5/10

Dissatisfaction in our political leadership seems to be driving at least some of our frustration with democracy in Australia.

We have stopped listening to what our political leaders have to say. ( ABC News: Matt Roberts )

The Australian Election Study asks Australians to rate leaders on a scale from zero to 10, where zero means they strongly dislike that politician, and 10 means they strongly like them.

Since 2010 — when Kevin Rudd was the most popular potential prime minister despite not leading the Labor Party at that time — no leader has scored more than an average of five.

Similarly, we have stopped listening to what our political leaders have to say. In 2007 and 2010 respectively, 47 per cent of Australians reported watching at least one televised election debate. By 2016, that number was down to 21 per cent.

It is certainly easy — and tempting — to blame this phenomenon on an uncommonly bad streak of political leaders, and the dual citizenship mayhem, and even factors like the major parties' reluctance to genuinely commit to gender equity in the parliament.

All of these things are fixable. We can recruit some decent leaders; perhaps even female leaders. We can better screen candidates for lurking citizenship gremlins. But comparative evidence suggests the rot is deeper.

Global trend in 'democratic malaise'

When we look internationally, we see a global trend in "democratic malaise": a kind of angry frustration with how democracy operates in countries like ours. It has been apparent for several decades, and across both established and emerging democracies.

This trend has been both grossly overblown and underestimated in turn. Academic research has cherry-picked international survey results to unfairly suggest that citizens in established democracies yearn for autocratic rule.

Evidence that people raised in democratic systems have turned their back on democratic freedoms and representation is a huge story: democracy and economic modernisation have gone hand in hand as obvious end goals of post-war progress.

If citizens in the West — as well as those in recent and current authoritarian regimes — cannot agree that we want to live under democracy, what can we possibly agree on?

The more mundane reality is that people living under democracies are not quite as unhappy as headline-grabbing research suggests.

How we analyse and interpret survey data can alternately terrify and assuage us.

But no matter how we finely slice these data, they all point to one overarching trend: citizens in democracies are expecting more from their political systems and political leaders, and they are increasingly underwhelmed by what they see.

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We have faith in parliament, not parliamentarians

Political scientists tend to differentiate between diffuse and specific political support. Diffuse support refers to our trust and confidence in underlying political structures. That is, we might have faith in the parliament, but not necessarily in parliamentarians.

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Elected representatives come and go, but the institutions underpinning them — the constitution, the parliament, the electoral system — are robust and dependable.

For the most part, diffuse political support has been high among Australian citizens.

We have good reason for this. Our electoral system is among the best in the world: the combination of two houses of parliament (one with semi-proportional representation), a stable and moderate party system, and compulsory voting that gives voice to even the least enthused citizens all combine to mean our politics are fairly predictable.

When our expectations are met — more or less — we tend to be satisfied. But at some point our political system may no longer meet citizens' expectations.

And there is no incentive for those who can modernise those institutions — our current legislators — to actually do so.

Dr Jill Sheppard is a lecturer in the ANU School of Politics and International Relations.