Winning, Losing, and the Quality of Democracy

Abstract

Citizens who voted for a party that won the election are more satisfied with democracy than those who did not. This winner–loser gap has recently been found to vary with the quality of electoral democracy: the higher the quality of democracy, the smaller the gap. However, we do not know what drives this relationship. Is it driven by losers, winners, or both? And Why? Linking our work to the literature on motivated reasoning and macro salience and benefiting from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project—covering 163 elections in 51 countries between 1996 and 2018, our results show that the narrower winner–loser gap in well-established electoral democracies is not only a result of losers being more satisfied with democracy, but also of winners being less satisfied with their victory. Our findings carry important implications since a narrow winner–loser gap appears as a key feature of healthy democratic systems.

Satisfaction with Democracy: The Impact of Institutions, Contexts and Attitudes

“…10 These estimates are taken from a re-estimation without the multilevel structure, because then we can take advantage of Stata's built-in calculations of total effects. 11 Even Daoust et al (2021), who find that political factors matter more as gross domestic product (GDP) goes up, show no clear evidence that political efficacy matters more than economic purchasing power for any set of countries.…”

“…In instrumental terms, this reduces the risk that policy will end up a long way from a citizen's ideal point (Anderson, 2010;André and Depauw, 2017;Ferland, 2021;Urbaniti and Warren, 2008). This consideration is where winner-loser status enters our model (see Nadeau et al [2021] for a review of the literature). 3.…”

Taking Without Giving: When Winning an Election Reduces Citizens' Support for Partisan Surrogate Representation

“…I argue that electoral winners prefer the representation of their own camp (republican representation), whereas citizens of the losing side expect their MP to aim for the common good of the constituency (pluralist representation). Many studies show that winning or losing an election influences citizens' political attitudes, for instance, their democratic satisfaction (e.g., Nadeau, Daoust, and Dassonneville 2021), trust in institutions (e.g., Anderson and LoTempio 2002), and external efficacy (e.g., Davis and Hitt 2017).…”

Are People More Satisfied with Democracy When They Feel They Won the Election? No

“…The first independent variable of interest is party performance, that is, whether the respondent voted for a party that ended up in government or not; on this operationalization, see Anderson et al (2005), Nadeau et al (2021), and Stiers et al (2018), among others. 3 As for all the independent variables, it is taken from the post-electoral survey.…”