Open AccessWinning, Losing, and the Quality of Democracy
Author(s) -
Richard Nadeau,
Jean-François Daoust,
Ruth Dassonneville
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
political studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.406
H-Index - 83
eISSN - 1467-9248
pISSN - 0032-3217
DOI - 10.1177/00323217211026189
Subject(s) - democracy , victory , salience (neuroscience) , quality (philosophy) , direct democracy , political science , political economy , economics , law , politics , psychology , philosophy , epistemology , cognitive psychology
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.