The winner-loser gap in perceptions of electoral integrity in Germany
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Abstract: Do electoral losers evaluate the fairness and integrity of elections differently than electoral winners? In representative democracies, regular and competitive elections are the principal mechanism for ensuring citizen influence on government. Elections are the main vehicle for determining who gets to rule, and ultimately for deciding on ‘who gets what, when, and how.’ Given their competitive nature, democratic electoral contests unavoidably produce winners and losers within the electorate. While previous research shows that electoral losers are less trustful towards politics and less satisfied with how democracy works than electoral winners, only little is known about how being on the winning or losing side of electoral contests impacts on citizens’ confidence in the electoral process itself. Any signs of a winner-loser gap in electoral-integrity perceptions might indicate that losers’ consent – the tacit acknowledgement of the legitimacy of a system that has produced an undesirable outcome – is at stake, with possibly far-reaching implications for the acceptance of election outcomes and participation in future electoral contests. Against this backdrop, this study breaks new ground by investigating whether and how experiences of winning and losing at the ballot box shape voters’ views about the fairness and integrity of the electoral process. Relying on newly collected data from the pre- and post-election surveys of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) 2021, the analysis provides evidence for a consistent winner-loser gap in voters’ electoral-integrity perceptions, with electoral losers reaching systematically more negative evaluations of the electoral process than electoral winners. In addition, the analysis shows that the winner-loser gap is particularly pronounced for voters who lost in two consecutive federal elections (‘repeated losers’) as well as for those who suffered electoral defeat with both their list and district votes (‘double losers’). These findings provide important insights on how voters in mixed-member proportional systems cope with winning and losing at the ballot box, highlighting that electoral losers place (part of) the blame for their electoral defeat on the electoral process and procedures as such.