Losing an Election Hurts. It Rarely Turns Voters Against Democracy.

The storming of the US Capitol in January 2021. The ransacking of Brazil’s Congress two years later. Easy to read these as symptoms of something deep and spreading: electorates so poisoned by partisan hatred that losing an election now means rejecting democracy itself. The logic feels airtight. If people despise their opponents enough, surely being on the wrong side of a ballot will push them toward the exits.

Turns out that logic might be wrong. Or at least, wrong in a rather important way.

A large comparative study spanning 35 elections across 30 countries has found that while voters who lose elections do become considerably less satisfied with how democracy is functioning, their actual commitment to democracy’s core rules barely budges. Winners and losers diverge sharply in their feelings about the system. They diverge only minimally in their willingness to play by its rules.

“Being more satisfied when you have won than when you have lost is normal. It happens in all areas of life,” says Sergi Ferrer, a political scientist at the Open University of Catalonia who co-led the research. “What can be problematic is when winning or losing makes you more or less democratic, or leads you to support undemocratic acts in cases with high levels of polarization. We thought that this might be the case, but the results show the opposite, even though we studied it in different environments and using different methods.”

The Gap That Matters

The distinction the researchers are drawing here is subtle but critical. Most previous work on electoral winners and losers has focused on “satisfaction with democracy”, essentially how happy you are with how things are going. That measure, the study confirms, tracks closely with whether your side won. In polarized environments the gap widens further still, with losers growing considerably more disenchanted while winners become only marginally more enthusiastic. Affective polarization, the technical term for that generalised hostility people feel toward supporters of rival parties, seems to drag losers down but does relatively little to lift winners.

What the researchers were really after, though, was something different: do winners and losers actually diverge on the fundamental norms that hold democracies together? Things like whether majorities should still protect minority rights, or whether it’s acceptable for a leader to bend constitutional rules if they believe it serves the greater good. These aren’t measures of satisfaction. They’re measures of democratic commitment itself.

The answer, across five years of data and three separate studies, was surprisingly consistent. The gap exists: winners are statistically more likely to favour unconstrained majority rule, losers more likely to value minority protections, but the size of that gap is roughly a third of the satisfaction gap, shrinking to around a fifth when researchers controlled for how large a party the voter had supported. On a five-point scale, we’re talking about a difference of perhaps 0.06 points. “If there is a difference between winners and losers in terms of support for basic democratic norms,” Ferrer notes, “it remains constant regardless of the level of polarization.”

Natural Experiments, Unexpected Coalitions

To strengthen their case, the team went beyond survey data. In New Zealand’s 2017 election, an extraordinary thing happened mid-polling: New Zealand First, expected to prop up the incumbent National party government, flipped unexpectedly to Labour instead. The CSES survey was already in the field when Jacinda Ardern became prime minister in what was, by that country’s standards, one of the biggest electoral upsets in modern memory. Overnight, National voters went from winners to losers and Labour voters went the other way.

National voters’ satisfaction with democracy dropped noticeably, about a quarter of a standard deviation, in the days after the announcement. Their support for democratic norms? Essentially unchanged. A similar pattern emerged from Chile’s 2021 presidential runoff, in which Gabriel Boric narrowly defeated the right-wing candidate José Antonio Kast, close enough that the researchers could compare attitudes of Kast voters just before the result with attitudes just after. Higher affective polarization made losing more painful in terms of satisfaction, but it didn’t translate into greater willingness to abandon the rules of the game.

The football analogy is instructive here, as Ferrer himself applies it. Losing a derby match to your fiercest rival is genuinely more painful than losing to a mid-table side. Fans report worse moods, sharper frustration. But that does not mean they start wanting to change the offside rule. “To make a comparison with football,” Ferrer says, “being angry at losing to your biggest rival is one thing, and wanting to change the basic rules of football after you lose is something else entirely.”

Why the Reservoir Holds

The researchers had expected affective polarization to erode what political scientists, borrowing from David Easton, call the “reservoir of goodwill”, a kind of accumulated democratic capital that helps citizens accept outcomes they don’t like. High enough animosity toward your political opponents, the thinking went, might drain that reservoir, leaving democratic norms exposed to the fluctuations of winning and losing.

It didn’t happen. Which raises the question of why not. The paper offers two interpretations, and they’re rather different in their implications. The optimistic reading is that citizens are genuinely more principled than we credit them for, that there is something like a bedrock democratic commitment that persists even through partisan bitterness, even through the rage of losing. People may hate their opponents; they still, on the whole, prefer a world with fair elections to one without.

The pessimistic reading is that citizens are simply shrewd. Winners inevitably become losers eventually. If you grant the current majority unconstrained power, and then one day you find yourself in the minority, that power will be turned against you. Elections, on this view, function as a kind of insurance policy. Citizens support the rules not out of principled conviction but out of enlightened self-interest, knowing the wheel turns.

Both interpretations, the researchers note, leave room for concern. The study found that in cases where democratic backsliding has occurred, it tends to involve voters who were already less committed to democratic norms before they became winners, not voters who were radicalised by the act of winning itself. The threat, in other words, may not be that elections corrupt democratic attitudes. The threat may be that undemocratic citizens occasionally end up on the winning side.

“If we want a democracy to work properly, the winners must not use their status as winners to give themselves more powers, and the losers must accept that they have lost and that the way to achieve power is simply to win elections in the future,” says Ferrer. The research team is now investigating “asymmetric polarization”: whether the identity of which parties are doing the polarising, and who their opponents are, changes the picture in ways the current data can’t reveal. Some democracies, it turns out, may be more resilient than their noisiest moments suggest. The question is whether that resilience has limits we haven’t yet found.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does losing an election make people less democratic?

Not really, according to this research. Losing does make people less satisfied with how democracy is working, but their support for the basic rules of democracy (like protecting minority rights and accepting majority outcomes) changes very little. The difference between winners and losers on these core norms is around a third the size of the difference in their satisfaction levels.

Does political polarization make things worse?

For satisfaction with democracy, yes: polarization significantly widens the gap between how happy winners and losers feel about the system, mainly by making losers more discontented. But for commitment to democratic norms themselves, polarization appears to make very little difference. Even highly polarised winners and losers showed similar levels of support for democratic principles as their less polarised counterparts.

How did the researchers actually measure democratic commitment?

They asked survey respondents two kinds of questions: whether the will of the majority should always prevail even at the expense of minority rights, and whether having a strong leader who bends constitutional rules is acceptable. These tap into what political scientists call “winners’ restraint” and “losers’ consent”, meaning the willingness of each side to accept democratic constraints even when it’s not in their immediate interest.

Could these findings change if a country’s democracy deteriorates significantly?

Possibly. The study focused on countries with reasonably robust democratic institutions, and the authors caution that their findings may not apply to countries experiencing sustained or severe democratic erosion. Where citizens no longer trust that elections are fair or that power can change hands peacefully, the dynamics could look quite different.

https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140251414013