Losers’ Lament: Democratic Disenchantment in Dominant-Party Enclaves

• In Event: Citizens' Perspectives on Democracy

Abstract

Efforts to understand the degree to which citizens trust in and support democratic political institutions and processes, as well as abide by and see as legitimate the policies their system produces, represent a core agenda in political science. One important strand of this research has focused on the attitudes of those citizens in democratic systems whose preferred candidate did not win the election in question. The organizing concept driving this research is “losers’ consent” (Nadeau and Blais 1993), the notion that for a democratic system to function effectively, the losers of an electoral contest must accept that defeat and not let it undermine support for the larger democratic system.

Much of the work on the consequences of losing has focused on how national-level system characteristics shape cross-country variations in the “winners-losers gap” in established and emerging democracies. Losers in democracies with proportional electoral formulas, for example, tend to express higher levels of system support and engage with politics at higher rates than their counterparts who supported losing candidacies in systems with majoritarian elections (Anderson et al. 2005).

We know little, however, about the attitudinal consequences of winning and losing in the context of less-than-democratic subnational regimes that are nested within nationally democratic systems. In such systems, one party retains power for an extended period of time at the state or provincial level, often through undemocratic means—these subnational systems have been identified and dubbed dominant-party “enclaves” in national democracies as diverse as India, Mexico, and the U.S., among others. Losers in dominant-party enclaves might not have ever voted for a winning gubernatorial candidate in their lifetime. The implications of the winners-losers gap with respect to support for democracy in general, and one’s political system in particular, potentially stand in stark contrast in dominant-party enclaves to what is typically inferred about such a gap in the “loser’s consent” work carried out at the cross-national level.

In dominant-party enclaves, citizens supporting the winning candidate for the principal offices of power are tacitly supporting, or at least tolerating, the undemocratic means through which power is retained in such systems. Conversely, those who persist in opposing the dominant-party in such systems are in many instances supporting democracy through their opposition to one-party rule. A winners-losers gap in such a situation, then, is a concern for the larger democratic system in which such systems are embedded not because of the low levels of system support among losers but, rather, the high level of system support among winners.

In this project we endeavor to more fully explore the implications of “losers’ consent” in a context where the losers stand in opposition to an undemocratic political system at the subnational level, while the winners have chosen to back a set of incumbents who seek to undermine a deepening of democracy. Through analysis of survey data from the 23 provinces of Argentina and the 32 states of Mexico, of which twelve remained dominant-party enclaves at the close of 2020, we offer a new perspective on the concept of losers’ consent where the winners may pose more of a threat to a burgeoning national democratic culture than the losers, while the lack of subnational system support found among losers in these contexts manifests itself in a more generalized lack of support for the national democracy in which they live. A key normative concern emerging from this work relates to the impact dominant-party enclaves can have on the prospects for democratic deepening at the country level, against the backdrop of a global democratic recession.

Authors

• Jonathan T. Hiskey, Vanderbilt University

• Mason Wallace Moseley, West Virginia University