Satisfaction with democracy is a widely studied measure of political support that is key for democratic stability. In this article, I explore its relationship with party system closure, that is the extent to which inter-party relations in the governmental area are stable and predictable. I argue that this relationship captures a trade-off between two key democratic outputs: representation and accountability. Analysing a dataset of 755 observations from 26 European countries throughout the period 1973–2019, I show that this trade-off manifests in an ‘inverted-U’ shaped relationship between party system closure and satisfaction with democracy. This result implies an optimal level of party system closure which reconciles the tension between the two in a way that maximises satisfaction with democracy.
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