Losers’ consent is a key indicator of democratic vitality. In a functioning democracy, citizens should accept electoral outcomes regardless of which party wins. Contrasting with previous studies on the topic, we, in this article, directly measure the types of electoral outcomes to which over 5,000 German adults, representative of the national population, are willing to consent/dissent. We find that respondents are more likely to accept, and less likely to protest, outcomes in which their preferred party performs well, and their most disliked party performs poorly. Meanwhile, structural features of the outcomes, such as the number of parties in government or whether the Chancellor comes from the party with the most seats, have little to no effect. These results support the idea that partisanship is the main driver of electoral consent/dissent, and that negative preferences have a unique explanatory power in this respect.
Blais et al. (Wed,) studied this question.