2
Political institutions and losing
Many studies of legitimacy in democratic societies assess affect towards current
institutions by examining such measures as levels of satisfaction with democracy, or trust
in government (e.g. Norris 1999: Kaase and Newton 1995; Listhaug 1995, Klingermann
and Fuchs, 1995). Democracies may remain stable and be seen as legitimate by citizens
as long as political minorities who “lose” are willing to remain committed to playing the
game of electoral politics (Anderson and LoTempio 2002; Anderson and Guillory 1997;
Listhaug 1995). Acceptance of the existing rules of the game may erode, however,
among those who lose, and especially among those who lose repeatedly. Repeat losers
are, furthermore, more likely to begin to think about changing the rules (Riker 1986).
Our approach to assessing support for current institutions, then, is to see how perceptions
of electoral losses affect evaluations of democracy, and to test how receptive citizens are
to proposals to alter institutions. We seek to determine if electoral losses affect how
people evaluate how democracy works, and to assess how electoral winners and losers
reason about changing democratic institutions.
Satisfaction with democracy is a standard measure of affect towards current
institutions. Another, more telling, measure of affect towards institutions is the public’s
willingness to change their current democratic institutions and support alternative
arrangements. A willingness to change being a sign of how discontented people really
are with their current institutions. One of the major hypotheses of interest below, then, is
the degree to which being a ‘loser’ in an electoral sense pushes people into changing
rules about how elections and representation work. We suggest that when people are
presented with alternative institutional arrangements their choices may be informed by
Convention