How to be Gracious about Political Loss—The Importance of Good Loser Messages in Policy Controversies

• Author: Peter Esaiasson,Sveinung Arnesen,Hannah Werner
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140221109433
• Published date: 01 April 2023
• Date: 01 April 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2023, Vol. 56(5) 599–624

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00104140221109433

journals.sagepub.com/home/cps

How to be Gracious

about Political Loss—The

Importance of Good

Loser Messages in Policy

Controversies

Peter Esaiasson

1

, Sveinung Arnesen

2

and

Hannah Werner

3



Abstract

Accepting defeat in political decision-making is crucial for the health of de-

mocracies. At the same time, being a good loser is challenging. How can

citizens be motivated to be gracious about various types of political loss? In

this paper, we study whether political leaders can play an important role in

boosting the perceived quality of decision-making processes among losers in

policy conf‌licts. We propose and test the impact of a simple intervention post-

decision: good loser messages delivered by co-partisan leaders that remind

citizens about the rules of the game. Three survey experiments on probability

samples of the Norwegian and Swedish population (total n= 4700) show that

good loser messages can indeed boost the process evaluations of policy losers.

These f‌indings emphasize the potential of procedural messaging to build

loser’s consent between elections.

1

University of Gothenburg, Sweden

2

NORCE - Norwegian Research Centre

3

University of Leuven, Belgium

Corresponding Author:

Peter Esaiasson, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, PO 52,

Gothenburg SE405 30, Sweden.

Email: Peter.Esaiasson@pol.gu.se

Keywords

Loser’s Consent, Procedural Fairness, Democratic Legitimacy, Policy

Conf‌lict, Winner-Loser Gap

“Democratic citizens must be good losers, willing to accept with good grace and

no loss of commitment to the polity that the democratic game will not always go

their way.”(Sabl, 2005, p. 216)

Democracy is challenging for losers in political conf‌licts. It is generally

agreed that democratic polities will function better—be less conf‌lictual—if the

losing camp complies with the outcome and maintains trust in the decision-

making authority (Levi, 1997;Sabl, 2005). Yet, it is diff‌icult to be gracious

about political loss. The losing camp will receive less utility from the system,

will experience negative emotions such as anger and frustration, and will

harbor feelings of dissonance toward a system that rejects their political views

(Anderson et al., 2005;Pierce et al., 2016;Przeworski, 1991;Soroka, 2014).

Rather than being good losers, it is psychologically easier to blame the other

side for winning unfairly. Numerous empirical studies have documented a

winner-loser gap in the context of elections; electoral losers typically consider

the political system and the decision-making process as less legitimate than

winners (e.g., Anderson et al., 2005;Daniller, 2016;Marien & Kern, 2018).

This is where responsible democratic leadership comes into play. Leaders

are aware of their followers’disposition to react poorly to loss at the ballot box

(indeed, leaders are similarly disposed) (Sheffer et al., 2018). Nevertheless, at

election night, responsible leaders manage to shake off the negatives asso-

ciated with losing and take the stage to concede defeat and to ensure that they

will be a loyal opposition until the next election (Corcoran, 1994;Mirer &

Bode, 2015;Sabl, 2002;Weaver, 1982). Leaders’concession speeches at

election night signal to followers that they too are expected to react con-

structively to the unfavorable electoral outcome. It is telling that Przeworski

(1991, p. 10) def‌ines democracy as “the system in which parties lose

elections.”

Responsible actions on election night help democracy fulf‌ill its core

function to solve social conf‌lict peacefully, but it requires effort from those

involved. It is generally acknowledged that citizens need to learn how to lose

elections (Anderson & Mendes, 2006;Anderson et al., 2005), and that re-

sponsible leaders should assist in the process (Linz & Stepan, 1978). Over the

years, arrangements have come to work well in established democracies, but

events following the 2020 US presidential election are a reminder that the

agreement between democratic winners and losers is not set in stone.

600 Comparative Political Studies 56(5)