Electoral Stakes & Feelings of Loss: A Bottom-Up Approach

• In Event: The Psychology of Political Participation

Abstract

Electoral losers play a central role in the study of democratic politics, as the stability and legitimacy of a democratic system depend on losers’ consent (Anderson et al., 2005; Anderson & Tverdova, 2001; Hansen et al., 2019; Nadeau & Blais, 1993). What makes some losers accept election outcomes and continue voting, while others disengage from politics or worse, object to the legitimacy of an election and pose a threat to democracy? I argue that one factor that affects the consequences of electoral loss is election stakes - some losses feel bigger than others.

Much of the research on electoral stakes focuses on economic factors like tax burdens (Huber et al., 2022) and home ownership, or on abstract measures, such as ideological distance, and polarization (Janssen 2023). These factors matter, but elections can bring issues that cannot be conceptualized as either money or ideology but involve clear and tangible rights, like abortion, marriage, or voting. Beyond rights, elections can have profound implications for power structures more broadly. Elections can decide who sits on federal courts, the shape of congressional districts, and the scope of presidential power. Elections also decide who holds power. I hypothesize that the racial composition of both the winning voting coalition and the officeholders themselves can affect how citizens process electoral loss.

In this paper, I couple existing ANES data with an original survey experiment, to evaluate what is meaningful about election losses to different voters. In the survey experiment, I randomly assign participants to a prompt in which they are asked to recall a meaningful recent election in which their side lost (or won, or simply, to recall a meaningful election). This allows for a comparison of winning vs. losing based on respondent-generated memories, and the stakes of elections in the respondents’ own words. I hypothesize that all-or-nothing rights (such as abortion) and distributions of power will have greater effects than economic factors or ideological distance on the political consequences of loss, such as diminished trust in elections, perceptions of legitimacy, and interest in politics. As the role of losers in American politics gains attention in academic research and in media accounts, a bottom-up approach allows researchers to more carefully evaluate what separates election deniers from gracious losers.

Author

• Bethany Albertson, University of Texas at Austin