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

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

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

Accepting defeat in political decision-making is crucial for the health of democracies. 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.publishedVersio

Why Swedes Don’t Wear Face Masks During the Pandemic – A Consequence of Blindly Trusting the Government

Government trust is generally helpful for societies, especially in crisis situations, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, because governments rely on citizens to follow directives. Worldwide, with supporting evidence accumulating, a key directive has been to wear face masks. However, in Sweden, the government has questioned their usefulness. On other behavioral recommendations, such as handwashing, the government has taken a conventional path. We rely on this non-recommendation of face masks to examine the causal impact of government trust on behavior. Based on a large Swedish survey fielded during the pandemic, we find that higher government trust reduces the likelihood of wearing face masks. In contrast, higher trust increases the likelihood of handwashing. The findings qualify the conclusion about the beneficial consequences of trust

Scandal Fatigue: Scandal Elections and Satisfaction with Democracy in Western Europe 1977-2007

We combine Eurobarometer surveys with contextual data from 19 countries and three decades, and find that elections are increasingly associated with major scandals. In the late 1970s few elections were associated with major scandals whereas today 40-50 percent are. Further, looking at the entire period, both recent and past scandal elections have had long-term negative (rather than positive) net effects on satisfaction with democracy. However, as scandals have become more common—at different rates in different countries—the once negative net effect has withered away. This “scandal fatigue syndrome” appears driven both by changes in the composition of scandal elections (multi-actor scandal elections still have negative effects but have not become more common), as well as by larger heterogeneity in effects (single-actor scandal elections used to be inconsequential but gradually assume positive effects as scandal elections become more common). The concluding section discusses possible interpretations and implications

Does Compliance Correlate with Political Support?

The literature on state legitimacy posits a close relationship between attitudinal political support and compliant behavior. The relationship is well theorized, but an examination of the empirical evidence suggests a significant lacuna. In the literature that focuses citizens’ attitudinal political sup-port, the relationship has been tested through the use of proxies for behavior. In the literature that focuses states’ actions to coax compliance out of citizens, the relationship is derived from behavior. To begin fill this gap in the research, the paper estimates country-level correlations between standard measures of attitudinal political support and a compliant behavior index generated by us. Using data from comparative survey studies (attitudinal support) and official records (compliant behavior), we find a strong and consistent correlation between the two key variables

The Immigration Issue and Anti-Immigrant Party Success: Is Sweden the Odd Case Out?

The handling of the immigration issue by established parties and the electoral success of anti-immigrant parties are closely linked. Comparative research on anti-immigrant parties argues that articulation of the immigration issue by established parties help make anti-immigrant parties electorally viable. The Swedish case seems to challenge this view. While there is no successful anti-immigrant party, scholars claim that the immigration issue has been a salient issue for established parties at least since the mid 1990s. However, contradicting this claim, this paper argues that Swedish established parties have chosen to not articulate the immigration issue. It first demonstrates empirically that the immigration issue has indeed an electoral potential in Sweden. Using primary data on election manifestos and televised party leader debates from 1970 to 2006, it then shows that established parties have downplayed the immigration issue in their vote-seeking activities

Roba Pero Hace? An experimental test of the competence-corruption tradeoff hypothesis in Spain and Sweden

From previous research it is known that one of the main mechanisms that limits the ability of elections to be effective in controlling corruption has to do with a sort of implicit exchange of transparency for competence, as summarized by the Latin-American saying ‘roba pero hace’. However, we do not know how this mechanism travels across contexts, and especially whether it also operates in low corruption situations. In this paper we conduct a full factorial 2x2 survey-embedded experiment in which we manipulate ‘competence’ and ‘corruption’ of an incumbent mayoral candidate to estimate the effect of competence on the electoral cost of corruption. We replicate the experiment in a context with low level of corruption (Sweden) and another one with a medium level of prevalence (Spain). Results show clear evidence of such an exchange in both national contexts, and point to a mechanism of dissonance reduction as one of its drivers