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.
Highlights
Citizens who voted for a party that won the election are more satisfied with democracy than those who did not
We argue in this article that this process of motivated reasoning, that has been studied with a focus on different political objects, offers a compelling framework to understand the emergence of post-electoral winner–loser gaps in levels of satisfaction with democracy (SWD) (Kernell and Mullinix, 2019; Mullinix, 2016)
We argue in this article that the observed variation in the size of the winner–loser gap in satisfaction across contexts crucially depends on the interaction between an individual-level psychological process, motivated reasoning, and the differences in the information environment in low- and high-quality democracies
Summary
Citizens who voted for a party that won the election are more satisfied with democracy than those who did not.
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