Electoral Defeat Research Articles

Do Transnational Rating Agencies “Regulate” National Political Budget Cycles?

Regulatory theory assumes governments constrain undesirable behavior by firms, but the opposite could be true internationally. We show how with credit rating agencies (CRAs) and election-year government borrowing. Political business cycle theory implies that governments sometimes borrow excessively to retain office. Transnational regime theory implies that CRAs regulating global credit allocation can threaten borrowing governments with rating downgrades signaling poor economic stewardship to voters. Analyses of CRA ratings and government borrowing for 63 countries holding 109 elections from 2001-2011 indicate support for both implications: 1) governments increase election-year borrowing; 2) CRA rating downgrades increase government electoral defeat likelihoods; and 3) governments diminish excessive election-year borrowing when CRAs signal higher downgrade likelihoods. Such reverse “regulation” raises new issues for international business research, practice, and public policy.

Labour, left and right: On party positioning and policy reasoning

Since the Second World War, the Labour Party has alternated between periods in which it has been positioned further to the left and others when it has been further to the right. The standard explanation for those oscillations is electoral–ideological. Labour moves to the right (towards the political centre) when it prioritises electoral considerations, usually after a period in opposition. It moves to the left when it prioritises ideology, usually after periods in government. Against this we propose a political economy–policy explanation. Labour moves to the right and a redistributive economic strategy when the economy is performing reasonably well. It moves to the left and adopts a structural economic reform programme when the economy is perceived to be in crisis. We argue that the political economy–policy explanation offers a more satisfactory account of when and why Labour has changed its spatial policy positioning in this period. By acknowledging the role of what we term ‘policy reasoning’ in the processes by which political parties (and the public) adopt and change spatial policy positions, our approach provides an alternative to the mechanistic models deriving from Downsian rational choice theory. It suggests that, contrary to general expectation, the Labour Party under Keir Starmer does not need to react to its 2019 election defeat by shifting significantly to the right.

A Comparative Analysis of Hillary Clinton and John Mahama’s Concession Speeches in the 2016 US and Ghanaian Presidential Elections

Comparative research contributes to knowledge by providing a better understanding of how a phenomenon manifests in different socio-cultural contexts. In this present study, we examined the concession speeches of Hillary Clinton (United States, Democratic Party) and John Mahama (Ghana, National Democratic Congress, NDC) in the aftermath of their 2016 electoral defeats. Findings indicated that three similar frames emerged between the two candidates. Hillary Clinton’s frames included: acknowledging pain and acceptance, democracy, values and nationalism, and gratitude. John Mahama’s frames had: acceptance and concern, appreciation, unity, democracy, and nationhood. Both candidates accepted the electoral outcome, showed gratitude, and reaffirmed their belief in democracy and unity. However, there were slight differences. Hillary Clinton’s frame on acknowledging pain and acceptance had a more open, forthright recognition of being hurt in a way that enabled her to process the loss and pain. Findings from this study provide insights into recent concession speeches across two socio-cultural and continental divides, which builds on literature in framing and political communication.

Latvia: Political Developments and Data in 2021

AbstractThe fight against Covid‐19 largely shaped the Latvian political agenda, undermined public support for key political institutions and led to ministerial changes in 2021. Some opposition parties attempted to use the pandemic to mobilize their supporters ahead of the 2022 parliamentary elections. The populist KPV LV/Partija KPV LV (KPV LV) party suffered a crushing defeat in the municipal elections, which were characterized by low turnout, the modest success of centre‐left parties and a rather good showing of the governing parties.

Un verano difícil en la historia del Partido Nacional uruguayo (1931)

This article investigates a temporary limited period, the summer of 1931, but with great significance to the Uruguayan National Party, since it would define its rupture and field of action during the next three decades. The active media participation in the nationalist debate of its most popular leader, Luis Alberto de Herrera, constitutes one of the main points of analysis. Herrera had been the defeated candidate in the last three presidential campaigns (1922, 1926 and 1930) and was constituted for part of the leadership as the symbol of party failure. On the contrary, he cautiously showed that the adherence of most of the party mass insisted on him as a «guide». During those months, nationalism witnessed a tense division that surprised itself and its adversaries, so in this work, a meticulous reconstruction of the discussions is carried out that allows to understand why the wounds of that internal battle, product of the unexpected electoral defeat of November 1930, would be very difficult to heal.

Does a mayor matter? Gentrification, land use policy, and the 2018 mayoral election in Burnaby, BC

Following the 2018 electoral defeat of Burnaby's incumbent five‐term mayor, the city enacted a significant policy shift regarding its approach to renters in the gentrifying town centre of Metrotown. This change received unanimous support from Council, despite the fact that seven of eight Councillors were incumbents belonging to the former mayor's political party. In addition to two extensive on‐record interviews with former mayor Derek Corrigan in the summer of 2017, this research is informed by a close reading of municipal documents and media accounts, attendance at public events and interviews with housing stakeholders, and quantitative data analysis. Of note are the arguments that the former mayor provided to justify his opposition to the renter support policies that followed his departure from office. Metrotown renters’ displacement was attributed to the marginalized position of rental tenure in Canadian society, irresponsible life choices of the poor, and insufficient federal government housing supports for refugees in Metro Vancouver.

Electoral Campaigns and Biased Perceptions of Voter Interests

AbstractA standard view of elections is that parties should choose moderate platforms to maximize their probability of winning. However, some parties embrace more extreme positions. These parties often feature an energized activist group that is optimistic about the party's probability of winning – contradicting the standard view. We build and analyze a game‐theoretic model of electoral competition that simultaneously explains the prevalence of extreme platforms and activists' biased beliefs. We show that the activists' interests and role within the campaign induce them to optimally misperceive the interests of the electorate because such a bias shifts the party's equilibrium policy platform closer to the activist faction's ideal point. We also find that even though the more optimistic an activist faction, the more it learns from electoral defeat, the divergence between activist and elite beliefs may worsen after a loss.

Propositions on right-wing populism: Available, excessive, optimistic

Every discourse on right-wing populism is, more or less explicitly, a discourse on affect. From claims that right-wing populism emerges from a background of racialized resentment or the anger of the ‘left behind’, through to analyses of how populist politicians mobilized hatred and rage in a ‘post-truth era’, attempts to explain the emergence and electoral success of contemporary right-wing populism have centered affect. In the midst of the turbulence of post 2007 financial crisis politics, the discourse on right-wing populism has repeated the tensions and ambivalences that surround affective politics per se – with populism simultaneously serving as a warning of what an affect-based politics might become, whilst also seeming to offer a lesson for the liberal-left in how to mobilize and move people otherwise disaffected. In this paper we supplement this attention to affect, and step outside of this tensed relation, by articulating the structure of feeling of contemporary right-wing populism in the U.S.A and UK. We do so through the form of the proposition, finding in the proposition a style of inhabiting an impasse that (re/dis)orientates attention and opens up disagreement and further discussion. In the first proposition - populism is available – we explore questions of definition, settling on how the discursive emptiness of populism allows for its constant articulation. Populism is excessive – the second proposition – shifts to emphasizing the affective fullness of populism, following how this fullness plays out in registers such as fun. Our third proposition – populism is optimistic – argues that right-wing populism is dependent on a ‘temporal loop’ optimism where the future to come blurs with the past that was. We conclude with some reflections on the future of this affect structure in light of the January 2021 events in the US Capitol and the electoral defeat of Donald J Trump.

Feeling protected: protective masculinity and femininity from Donald Trump and Joe Biden to Jacinda Ardern

This article emphasises the role that political leaders’ discourse plays in evoking positive emotions among citizens in uncertain times, such as feeling protected, secure and proud in addition to the leaders’ (often interconnected) role of encouraging negative feelings such as fear, resentment and anger. The article argues that such discourse frequently involves performances of gendered leadership. It cites examples from a range of countries to illustrate the points being made, but focuses on the 2020 US presidential election which saw a contest between two forms of protective masculinity: Trump’s exclusionary, macho, hypermasculinity versus Biden’s more socially inclusive, empathetic and softer version. Trump’s protective masculinity failure over managing the COVID-19 pandemic was arguably one of the factors contributing to his electoral defeat, while Biden aimed to make voters feel safer and more protected than under Trump. The article also provides examples of protective femininity, with a particular focus on the discourse of New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern.

The consequences of repeatedly losing on legitimacy beliefs

AbstractModern democracies are dependent on regular elections and citizens’ legitimacy beliefs. Studies have shown that repeated electoral defeats are associated with lower levels of satisfaction with democracy and political trust. However, previous studies have only considered one type of legitimacy belief at a time, never in comparison. What is more, all previous work is based on observational studies and has not been able to identify any causal effects of losing repeatedly. Building on previous work and classic theories of political legitimacy beliefs, we argue that repeatedly losing in elections represents a form of long‐term exclusion from democratic power that has additional negative effects on people's legitimacy beliefs because they lose faith in the system and start questioning its evenhandedness. We support our predictions using six‐wave panel data and test our hypothesis a total of 16 times within the same context. The findings show that repeated losers are never less satisfied with democracy but that an additional electoral loss leads to lower levels of political trust. The findings have important implications for the meaning of different indicators of legitimacy beliefs but also for electoral research and the underpinnings of stable democracies.

Front and Back Covers, Volume 38, Number 1. February 2022

Front and back cover caption, volume 38 issue 1QANONThis QAnon supporter was part of the crowd of demonstrators at the Washington DC ‘Million MAGA March’ shortly after Trump's 2020 electoral defeat. This woman's sign alludes to ‘The Storm’, a millenarian denouement that, in the QAnon imagination, will see Trump and his supporters rounding up and arresting top Democrats so as to retake power.In this issue, McIntosh describes the verbal art with which the mysterious and oracular figure of ‘Q’ managed to enlist millions of enthusiasts through the Internet. Q specialized in cryptic messages and urged online followers to decode and interpret them. These exercises fostered the notion that supporters themselves were engaging in high‐stakes interpretive work, and that a digital army of Q followers could see through fraudulent politicians and experts, ultimately garnering their own knowledge and expertise. At the same time, Q used the power of secrecy to impart the conviction that Q was connected to a new alt‐right state waiting in the wings.McIntosh also argues that the alt‐right — including but not limited to Q — have increasingly encouraged the idea that reality or truth may lie somewhere behind or beneath the unreliable sign vehicle. Communications from political enemies should be read with suspicion, while communications from Q and Trump alike should be decrypted for their underlying encoded meanings, particularly dark portents. This oracular semiotic ideology now thrives alongside conventional liberal understandings of rational political processes.MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESSPagan shaman Gordon MacLellan, also known as Creeping Toad, is an environmental educator who helps people find their own stories in nature. Here, he is storytelling in Plas Power Woods, Wales, UK. Gordon's stories are inclusive to anyone who wants to listen without discrimination.In this issue, Susan Greenwood characterizes magical consciousness as a pan‐human participatory and analogical mode of thought that underpins mythopoetic expressions ranging from the ancient narratives of the Australian Aboriginal Rainbow Snake and the life‐enhancing ecological stories of Gordon MacLellan to the alt‐right conspiracy theories fostering racial hatred embraced by ‘shaman’ and QAnon supporter Jake Angeli, a central figure in the storming of the US Capitol in 2021.Stories and storytelling are the modus operandi of magical consciousness. Essentially amoral, magical consciousness engages the emotions and helps create meaningful patterns that encompass varieties of human expression cross‐culturally.Magical consciousness manifests itself along a spectrum. It can sometimes lead to divisive actions fuelled by conspiracy theories such as QAnon. Analysis of magical consciousness may add a further dimension to the investigation of Western post‐truth societies whereby the Enlightenment notion of reason and scientific facts — as the only locus of ‘truth’ — contrasts with ways of engaging with reality primarily through emotions and beliefs.A better understanding of magical consciousness may help build bridges between Western cultures and the world views of indigenous peoples. In replacing machine metaphors with metaphors drawn from nature, such understandings may help shape our future responses to our planet's ecological, economic and social crises.

When the US far-right sneezes, the European far-right catches a cold. Quasi-experimental evidence of electoral contagion from Spain

Does the electoral defeat of a far-right party abroad influence support for similar parties at home? In this paper we posit, and test, the theoretical argument that signals of viability and popularity akin to bandwagon and titanic effects operate beyond the confines of national boundaries to cause voters to update domestic preferences based on comparable party performance abroad. By exploiting the quasi-experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of Donald Trump's 2020 electoral defeat with the Spanish sociological study's monthly barometer data collection, we provide robust causal evidence to show that Trump's electoral loss in the US had a negative contagious spillover effect on self-reported support for the Spanish far-right. Empirically we estimate intent-to-treat effects based on the as good as random exposure to the electoral results to isolate the impact of Trump's defeat on the voting intentions for Spain's new far-right party, VOX. Our results - which are robust to various modelling approaches including covariate adjustment, regional fixed effects, placebo issues, and nearest-neighbour matching - demonstrate that Trump's defeat to Joe Biden had a sizeable negative effect on expressed support for VOX. The contagion effect is substantive: equal to 3 to 6 percentage-points among the general population and 11 percentage-points among former right-wing voters. Our findings make an important contribution to the broader literature on electoral behaviour as they indicate that the electoral success of ideologically symmetrical parties abroad can play a role in understanding a party's domestic success by serving as an important information signal of these parties' electoral viability.

The Future of Islamism through the Lens of the Past

Islamist movements today face perhaps their most difficult conditions in decades. After seizing political openings after the Arab uprisings, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Sunni political Islamist organizations have suffered from military coups, electoral defeats, social and political polarization, and extreme repression. This is not the first time they have faced such catastrophic conditions, however, and historically Islamist organizations have proven to be resilient and able to return to public life. This article examines the history of Islamist movements in the Middle East recovering from extreme setbacks in order to identify nine key mechanisms that facilitated those rebounds and then considers which of those factors might be operative today. It concludes that many of those factors are less available than in the past, but that the global turn toward populism, the persistent governance failures of Arab states, and the adaptability of Islamists create greater opportunities for recovery than might initially appear plausible.

Reflections on the Present Conjuncture

This essay reflects on the COVID-19 pandemic, the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the months since Donald Trump’s electoral defeat, connecting these to the author’s book, The Punishment Monopoly: Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States. It argues that an understanding of the present conjuncture depends on centering the long history of dispossession and the punishment that enables it, and on the theft of land and labor on which U.S. sovereignty continues to depend. That foundation is, in the present conjuncture, being challenged by invigorated movements for racial and social justice and defended by equally invigorated fascistic defense of white supremacy and racialized capitalism. The author sees this clash and current ills not as a unique moment, but as a continuation of the arc of U.S. history, an arc that becomes visible if the history we tell emphasizes the foundation of racialized capitalism and its ongoing state-enforced theft, dispossession, and punishment.

What Curbs Social Investment? The Effect of Foreign Electoral Outcomes on Childcare Expenditure Levels

Abstract This study aims to deepen our understanding of social investment expansion proposing a political learning mechanism to link existing institutional and political explanations. When resources are limited, increased spending in social investment often comes at the expense of politically costly retrenchment of established social insurance policies. Previous studies suggest that this trade-off results in existing entitlements crowding out new policies, and that party ideology plays less of a role in determining social policy expansion. I argue that this is because parties face an electoral dilemma, as individual preferences for social investment and social insurance have been shown to differ between groups that partly overlap in their voting behaviour. Applying a policy diffusion framework to the analysis of childcare expenditure, this study proposes that policymakers learn from the political consequences of past decisions made by their foreign counterparts and update their policy choice accordingly. The econometric analysis of OECD data on childcare expenditure shows that governments tend to make spending decisions that follow those of ideologically similar cabinets abroad and that left-wing governments with a divided electorate tend to reduce childcare expenditure if a previous expansionary decision of a foreign incumbent is followed by an electoral defeat. The findings have implications for the study of the politics of social policy development.

Rising from the Ashes of Electoral Defeat : Reversal of Vlaams Belang’s Electoral Fortune in the Light of Supply-Side Explanation

Rising from the Ashes of Electoral Defeat : Reversal of Vlaams Belang’s Electoral Fortune in the Light of Supply-Side Explanation

Impact of the intra-party democracy on political parties' reactions to the electoral defeats - a case study of the selected political groupings in Poland

An electoral defeat usually marks a significant turning point in the life of political parties. It is often the beginning of the changes taking place within them (Harmel, Janda 1994; Gauja 2016: p. 50–51). Existing research suggest that the desire to improve the electoral outcome is the main argument for reform within political parties (Janda 1990; Harmel et al. 1995). This article looks at a relationship between the reactions of political parties to electoral defeat and one factor found to be important in this respect – i.e. the level of intra-party democracy (IPD) analysed at the organisational level. The study uses the IPD measurement model developed by Benjamin von dem Berge and his team (see: von dem Berge et al. 2013). The article provides the analysis of the level of intra-party democracy of the selected four Polish political parties (on the basis of their statutes) continuously present on the Polish political scene after 2001 and its impact on changes within political groupings after electoral defeats. The author examined the statutes of the Law and Justice (PiS), the Civic Platform (PO), the Polish People’s Party (PSL) and the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). These parties suffered defeats either in the 2011 or 2015 elections. The main research problem is to determine how the level of IPD of the examined parties influences their reactions after electoral defeats. The research hypothesis is: political parties with a higher level of IPD should change under the influence of electoral defeats more than parties with a lower level of this indicator. The study used also the methodology of data analysis (party’s statutes and other documents) and 21 structured in-depth interviews with representatives of party elites. Based on the results, the index of change after defeat in political parties is created.

Sore Losers: Does Terrorism and Approval of Terrorism Increase in Democracies When Election Losers Refuse to Accept Election Results?

A necessary component of peaceful democratic rule is the willingness of election losers to accept election defeats. When politicians and parties acknowledge defeat in democratic elections, they reinforce the peaceful transition of power that sustains political order. When election losers in democracies reject election results, the public’s confidence in democratic institutions is weakened, grievances and polarization abound, and the potential for violent mobilization grows. In this environment, terrorist activity is more likely. I test this proposition using cross-national time series panel data and within-country public opinion data for a wide set of democracies. I find that democracies experience significantly more domestic terrorist casualties when election losers reject election results. Moreover, I find that public willingness to tolerate and justify terrorism as a tactic increases in democratic countries where election losers reject election results.

Public Distrust in Disputed Elections: Evidence from Latin America

AbstractThe comparative literature on democratization has shown that election trust depends as much on subjective factors as on the objective conditions of the process. This literature, however, has thus far overlooked the consequences of candidates refusing to concede an electoral defeat. This letter argues that a disputed electoral outcome further inflames negative perceptions of electoral integrity among voters who supported a losing candidate. We bring support for this claim from a multilevel regression that includes data from the AmericasBarometer surveys on almost 100,000 respondents across 49 elections in 18 Latin American countries. We combine these responses with an original database of disputed elections in the region. The empirical findings demonstrate the eroding effect of challenged election outcomes on voters' election trust, particularly among those who voted for a losing candidate. The findings underscore an intuitive yet untested pattern: candidates' refusal to accept the electoral outcome is a strong signal among their supporters, increasing their distrust on the integrity of the process.

Axioms for defeat in democratic elections

We propose six axioms concerning when one candidate should defeat another in a democratic election involving two or more candidates. Five of the axioms are widely satisfied by known voting procedures. The sixth axiom is a weakening of Kenneth Arrow’s famous condition of the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA). We call this weakening Coherent IIA. We prove that the five axioms plus Coherent IIA single out a method of determining defeats studied in our recent work: Split Cycle. In particular, Split Cycle provides the most resolute definition of defeat among any satisfying the six axioms for democratic defeat. In addition, we analyze how Split Cycle escapes Arrow’s impossibility theorem and related impossibility results.