1
Introduction
The long-run resilience of representative democracy requires that those who lose
in the electoral arena share some basic commitment to maintaining democratic
institutions. Institutions, as North notes (1990), are the “rules of the game” that structure
a society. Recent scholarship underscores the important relationships between electoral
loss and attitudes about democratic practice (Anderson et al, nd.; Anderson and Guillory
1997; Anderson and LoTempio 2002; Anderson et al 2004; Banducci and Karp 2003;
Bowler and Donovan 2002). Other recent work has made important strides in advancing
our understanding of how citizens evaluate democratic institutions (see e.g. Kaase and
Newton 1995, Klingermann and Fuchs 1995; Norris 1999; Hibbing and Theiss-
Morse1995, 2002). Here we bridge these literatures by considering how responses to
electoral loss and losing shape how citizen reason about democratic institutions. This
study is an attempt to build on our understanding of how people make choices about
institutions, a project that North (1993) argues is perhaps the fundamental question we
must address in order to make further progress in the social sciences.
The paper is divided into three broad sections. In the first section we discuss the
relationship between political institutions and loss, setting out hypotheses that relate to
citizen attitudes towards institutional change. In the second section we present
experimental evidence that addresses these hypotheses. In the final section we draw out
the implications of these findings for democratic institutions more broadly.
Convention