Party Support, Values, and Perceptions of Electoral Integrity

Abstract

General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. [2010][2011][2012][2013][2014] to examine how anti-authoritarian values affect individuals' directional bias, driven by political party support, in evaluating electoral integrity. The results show that IPEI do depend on an interaction of political party support and the strength of anti-authoritarian values. However, the addition of the latter does not lead to a convergence of integrity evaluations among winners and losers, as may be expected under the assumption that anti-authoritarian values drive voters to more carefully monitor and evaluate the electoral process. Instead, it leads to greater polarization between electoral winners and losers. We explain the result with reference to the motivated reasoning literature on biased information processing: while anti-authoritarian convictions lead people to obtain more information on the electoral process, their political leanings bias their reading of this information, which in effect leads to stronger polarization in perceptions.

The integrity of the 2016 US Presidential Election: Exploring the possible impact of ideology on experts’ judgments

“…Moreover, it could be also argued that, assuming that the ideological position of American experts is closely tied to their voting attitude, the left-right variable is just a proxy of the electoral winner–loser phenomenon (Anderson and Guillory, 1997; see also Flesken and Hartl, 2017), and it is, in reality, this latter variable that explains the negative relationship found between the ideological position of experts and the PEI score. This would imply that experts on the left side of the political spectrum are significantly more likely to have a pessimistic opinion about the quality of the election not because a left-wing ideological stance decreases trust in political institutions as hypothesis 1 suggests (Devos et al, 2002), but as the result of a loser effect due to the disappointing outcome of the election.…”

Ethnicity, inequality, and perceived electoral fairness

“…Anderson et al 2005). The same holds for perceptions of electoral fairness (Wolak 2014;Flesken and Hartl 2018). We hence include a dummy for electoral win into our models: we code respondents as winners or losers according to whether they support government or opposition parties, respectively, at the time of the survey.…”

“…Citizens who doubt the fairness of elections show lower levels of political support more generally (Norris 2014); are less likely to vote (Birch 2010); and more likely to participate in electoral protests or even violence (Norris, Frank, and Martínez i Coma, Ferran 2015). Yet research on which factors affect citizens' perceptions of electoral fairness emerged only recently, and few studies focus on individualrather than context-level determinants (Atkeson, Alvarez, and Hall 2015;Flesken and Hartl 2018;Wolak 2014). To our knowledge, none so far has focused explicitly on the link between ethnicity and perceptions of electoral fairness (but see Norris 2004), let alone its intersection with socio-economic status, despite its importance for legitimacy in diverse societies.…”

When election expectations fail: Polarized perceptions of election legitimacy increase with accumulating evidence of election outcomes and with polarized media

“…Indeed, political scientists have examined the phenomenon whereby partisans from the losing party perceive elections as less legitimate than partisans from the winning party [ 9 – 12 ]. Although political scientists have linked polarized perceptions of election legitimacy to theories such as cognitive dissonance theory [ 6 , 13 – 17 ], the methods tend to confound before versus after voting with before versus after results become known because those two factors are closely intertwined in most elections.…”

“…Previous research in political science demonstrates that the tendency for winners to perceive elections as more legitimate than losers increases from before to after elections, consistent with predictions derived from cognitive dissonance theory [ 18 ]. However, those studies necessarily confound whether people have learned the election outcome with the possibility of voting in the election [ 9 – 12 ], leading to theoretical imprecision in what drives polarized perceptions of election legitimacy. Before an election, citizens can still influence election outcomes by voting and convincing others to vote for their candidate.…”