The Behavioral Components of Losers’ Consent

• In Event: Poster Session II: Comparative Politics

Abstract

There is a growing literature that examines how citizens’ satisfaction with democracy is shaped by whether their preferred party wins or loses. The consensus that has emerged is that winners are more satisfied than losers – especially in majoritarian systems. This finding has been shown to hold in a variety of national contexts, but ‘satisfaction’ is usually conceptualized as an attitude rather than as a behavior. The question we ask in this paper is what factors shape how dissatisfaction with democracy is translated into protest behavior? Electoral losers are universally dissatisfied, but only in some instances do losers attempt to challenge election outcomes, either by contesting the election results or advocating changing the system of government entirely. We argue that electoral losers are more likely to translate their dissatisfaction into protest behaviors, particularly when their side has lost multiple consecutive elections and in countries that have experienced a limited number of democratic transitions of power. We combine multiple barometer surveys from Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia with additional protest data to construct a cross-national test of our argument. We find that electoral losers are more dissatisfied with democracy than winners and more likely to translate dissatisfaction into action, but the likelihood varies as a function a country’s institutions and length of experience with democracy. Our findings offer strong support for our hypotheses.

Authors

• Joshua N. Zingher, Old Dominion University

• Benjamin Farrer, Knox College