Considerations of American Democracy, Feeling Like a Loser, and Support for Changing the Rules

• Published date: 01 September 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X231172905
• Author: Todd Donovan,Caroline Tolbert,Samuel Harper
• Date: 01 September 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2023, Vol. 51(5) 599–607

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X231172905

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Considerations of American Democracy,

Feeling Like a Loser, and Support for Changing

the Rules

Todd Donovan

1

, Caroline Tolbert

2

, and Samuel Harper

2

Abstract

We test how perceptions of feeling like a loser in American politics may condition support for changes to how elections are

conducted. We report a survey experiment that sheds some light on why people may feel like an electoral loser, then use this

measure of losing to predict support for a range of proposals to change elections. The experiment promp ted people to consider

if they were satisf‌ied with how democracy works and to think about the design and structure of American government.

Respondents were then asked if they felt like they were on the winning or losing ‘side’of politics. The prompt was associated

with higher rates of respondents reporting they felt like they were on the losing side. Non-experimental estimates of support for

a range of proposed changes to elections f‌ind a substantial relationship between this form of feeling like a loser, and supporting

changing how elections are conducted. This relationship holds with controls for partisanship and other factors. One implication

of this is that the more that some Americans are prompted to think about their government and democracy, the more likely

they support changing how it works.

Keywords

electoral rules, public opinion, losers in politics, election reform

Changes in election rules are relatively rare events at the national

level in established democracies (Lijphart, 1991), given the

incentives incumbent policymakers have for maint aining status

quo rules (Benoit, 2004;Cox, 1997). In the United States, f‌irst-

past-the-post rules (FPTP) structure national elections albeit with

some variation at the local level (Bowler and Donovan 2008).

Many election rules changes can be seen as elite driven, such as

diffusion of the direct primary in the US (e.g. Wa re , 20 0 2;

Reynolds, 2006), the brief adoption of the Alternative Vote (AV)

in British Columbia (Cairns, 1968),andadoptionofAVin

Australia (Farrell and McAllister 2005). Changes in electoral

arrangements may also be conditional on public opinion favoring

change. Examples include adoption of legislative term limits in

the US (e.g. Karp, 1995), adoption of MMP in New Zealand

(Banducci and Karp 1999), and single-winner ranked choice

voting (RCV/AV)in some US ci tiesand states (Sa ntucci, 2018).

This paper examines factors associated with public attitudes

about changing how American elections are conducte d.

Our understanding of how and when election rules may

change is enhanced by better understanding factors affecting

public attitudes associated with support for rules changes. A

number of existing studies examine mass opinions about

election rules in terms voter self-interest, with an emphasis on

understanding opinions in terms of how a change in an

electoral rule may be viewed in terms of how the change

advantages a person’s preferred political party (e.g. Karp,

1995;Bowler and Donovan 2007;Biggers and Bowler 2022).

Additional studies examine how ideology and values such as

fairness may affect evaluations of electoral rules (e.g.

Banducci and Karp 1999;Bowler et al., 2006), how an

electoral system may affect how people perceive democracy

(Gutierrez et al., 2022), and in terms of how dissatisfaction

with democracy corresponds with support for adopting new

rules (McCarthy and Santucci 2021). This paper follows this

latter path.

Our interest here is with what, other than supporting a

candidate who lost a recent election, may make people

perceive themselves as losing in electoral politics and how

this perception may affect support for changing how elections

are conducted. Much of the research on the ‘winner –loser’

gap in politics has focused on electoral losers rather narrowly

def‌ined; that is, people who reported they supported a party or

1

Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, USA

2

The University of Iowa, Iowa, IA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Todd Donovan, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225,

USA.

Email: Todd.Donovan@wwu.edu