Learning to lose: Election outcomes, democratic experience and political protest potential

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 91-111

  Anderson, Christopher J ^a   Mendes, Silvia M ^b  

^a SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MINHO   (Portugal)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 29144470120     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123406000056     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. Max Kaase, 'Interpersonal Trust, Political Trust, and Non-institutionalized Political Participation in Western Europe', West European Politics, 22 (1999), 1-21.
2. G. Bingham Powell, Contemporary Democracies: Participation, Stability and Violence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).
3. However, see also Nany Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
4. Edward N. Muller, Thomas Jukam and Mitchell Seligson, 'Diffuse Political Support and Antisystem Political Behavior', American Journal of Political Science, 26 (1982), 240-64.
5. Edward N. Muller and Karl-Dieter Opp, 'Rational Choice and Rebellious Collective Action', American Political Science Review, 80 (1986), 471-88;
6. Samuel Barnes and Max Kaase, eds, Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979).
7. Barnes and Kaase, Political Action;
8. M. Kent Jennings and Jan van Deth, eds, Continuities in Political Action (New York: de Gruyter, 1989).
9. Barnes and Kaase, Political Action;
10. Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik, 'Contentious Politics in New Democracies: East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, 1989-93', World Politics, 50 (1998), 547-81.
11. Different types of democratic systems define winners and losers in particular ways. Moreover, they determine the extent to which the winners may do what they want and what rights the losers have to prevent unfettered majority rule differently (Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999);
12. G. Bingham Powell, Elections as Instruments of Democracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000)).
13. William H. Riker, 'Political Theory and the Art of Heresthetics', in Ada W. Finifter, ed., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association, 1983).
14. See Christopher J. Anderson, André Blais, Shaun Bowler and Ola Listhaug, Losers' Consent: Elections and Democratic Legitimacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
15. Consistent with this, a large body of research has found that those who have the greatest stake in the system - measured by people's economic or political interests (income, social class and education) - also tend to express the highest levels of support for the existing political system (Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1965);
16. Christopher J. Anderson and Christine A. Guillory, 'Political Institutions and Satisfaction with Democracy: A Cross-National Analysis of Consensus and Majoritarian Systems', American Political Science Review, 91 (1997), 66-81;
17. Richard Nadeau and André Blais, 'Accepting the Election Outcome: The Effect of Participation on Losers' Consent', British Journal of Political Science, 23 (1993), 553-63;
18. Sidney Verba, Norman Nie and Jae-on Kim, The Modes of Democratic Participation (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1971)).
19. Similarly, those who have a social or economic stake in the system also are less likely to engage in political protest (M. Kent Jennings and Jan van Deth, eds, Continuities in Political Action (New York: de Gruyter, 1989)).
20. For a related discussion, see Powell, Elections As Instruments of Democracy.
21. Anderson et al., Losers' Consent.
22. Anderson and Guillory, 'Political Institutions and Satisfaction with Democracy';
23. Christopher J. Anderson and Andrew J. LoTempio, 'Winning, Losing, and Political Trust in America', British Journal of Political Science, 32 (2002), 335-51;
24. Susan A. Banducci and Jeffrey A. Karp, 'How Elections Change the Way Citizens View the Political System: Campaigns, Media Effects, and Electoral Outcomes in Comparative Perspective', British Journal of Political Science, 33 (2003), 443-67.
25. Susan A. Banducci, Todd Donovan and Jeffrey A. Karp, 'Proportional Representation and Attitudes about Politics: Results from New Zealand', Electoral Studies, 18 (1999), 533-55;
26. Banducci and Karp, 'How Elections Change the Way Citizens View the Political System' ;
27. Benjamin Ginsberg and Robert Weissberg', 'Elections and the Mobilization of Popular Support', American Journal of Political Science 22 (1978), 31-55.
28. E.g., Susan A. Banducci and Jeffrey A. Karp', 'Perceptions of Fairness and Support for Proportional Representation', Political Behaviour, 21 (1999), 217-38;
29. Harold D. Clarke and Alan C. Acock, 'National Elections and Political Attitudes: The Case of Political Efficacy', British Journal of Political Science, 19 (1989), 551-62;
30. M. Kent Jennings and Jan van Deth, 'Conclusion: Some Consequences for Systems and Governments', in M. Kent Jennings and Jan van Deth, eds, Continuities in Political Action (New York: de Gruyter, 1989).
31. Cf. Anderson et al., Losers' Consent.
32. Barbara G. Farah, Samuel H. Barnes and Felix Heunks, 'Political Dissatisfaction', in Samuel H. Barnes and Max Kaase, eds, Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979);
33. Jacques Thomassen, 'Economic Crisis, Dissatisfaction, and Protest', in M. Kent Jennings and Jan van Deth, eds, Continuities in Political Action (New York: de Gruyter, 1989);
34. Richard Topf, 'Beyond Electoral Participation', in Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Dieter Fuchs, eds, Citizens and the State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
35. Jonas Linde and Joakim Ekman, 'Satisfaction With Democracy: A Note on a Frequently Used Indicator in Comparative Politics', European Journal of Political Research, 42 (2003), 391-408.
36. For the classic controversy, see the exchange between Citrin and Miller. Researchers have pointed out that Easton's two categories do not exhaust the possible varieties of political attitudes towards democratic governance (M. Stephen Weatherford, 'Measuring Political Legitimacy', American Political Science Review, 86 (1992), 149-66).
37. The object of citizen support does not have to be, and probably cannot be, reliably separated in terms of the system and the system's outputs. The difficulties of independently measuring diffuse and specific support are enormous, and separate indicators of the two generally are found to be highly correlated (Max Kaase, 'Political Alienation and Protest', in Mattei Dogan, ed., Comparing Pluralist Democracies (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988). This means, unfortunately, that the distinction between diffuse and specific support has mainly been relevant at the conceptual level, not in the world of empirical social research.
38. Russell J. Dalton, Citizen Politics: Public Opinion and Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies, 3rd edn (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House Publishers, 2002);
39. Kaase, 'Interpersonal Trust, Political Trust, and Non-institutionalized Political Participation in Western Europe'.
40. Pippa Norris, 'Institutional Explanations for Political Support', in Pippa Norris, ed., Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Governance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
41. Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture;
42. Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989);
43. Richard Rose, William Mishler and Christian Haerpfer, Democracy and Its Alternatives: Understanding Post Communist Societies (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998);
44. Jacques Thomassen, 'Support for Democratic Values', in Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Dieter Fuchs, eds, Citizens and the State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
45. Several scholars have investigated this idea. Inglehart, for example, finds that the length of time that democratic institutions have persisted is positively correlated with levels of political satisfaction (Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990));
46. Steven E. Finkel, Edward N. Muller and Mitchell A. Seligson, 'Economic Crisis, Incumbent Performance and Regime Support: A Comparison of Longitudinal Data from West Germany and Costa Rica', British Journal of Political Science, 19 (1989), 329-51.
47. attribute the greater susceptibility of the German Weimar Republic to regime breakdown to the relative youth of its system in comparison to democracies such as France, Britain and the United States. Consistent with this, scholars have found that levels of democratic support are systematically lower in East-Central Europe than in the West (Gábor Tóka, 'Political Support in East-Central Europe', in Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Dieter Fuchs, eds, Citizens and the State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);
48. Arthur H. Miller, Vicki L. Hesli and William M. Reisinger, 'Conceptions of Democracy Among Mass and Elite in Post-Soviet Societies', British Journal of Political Science, 27 (1997), 157-90.
49. Christopher J. Anderson and Kathleen M. O'Connor, 'System Change, Learning, and Public Opinion about the Economy', British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 147-72;
50. Geoffrey Evans and Stephen Whitefield, 'Identifying the Bases of Party Competition in Eastern Europe', British Journal of Political Science, 23 (1993), 521-48;
51. William Mishler and Richard Rose, 'Learning and Re-Learning Regime Support: The Dynamics of Post-Communist Regimes', European Journal of Political Research, 41 (2002), 5-36;
52. Stephen Whitefield and Geoffrey Evans, 'The Russian Election of 1993: Public Opinion and the Transition Experience', Post-Soviet Affairs, 10 (1994), 38-60.
53. Cf. Dalton, Citizen Politics;
54. Jennings and van Deth, Continuities in Political Action.
55. The International Social Survey Program (ISSP) is a continuing annual programme of surveys covering topics important to social science research (International Social Survey Program (ISSP), International Social Survey Program: Role of Government III, 1996 [Computer file] (Cologne, Germany: Zentralarchiv fuer Empirische Sozialforschung [producer]. Cologne, Germany: Zentralarchiv fuer Empirische Sozialforschung/Ann Arbor, Mich.: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributors]). The ISSP jointly develops modules dealing with important areas in the social sciences, fields the modules in a fifteen-minute supplement to the regular national surveys undertaken by the members, includes an extensive common core on background variables, and makes the data available to the social science community.
56. For a variety of reasons, we excluded several countries from the ISSP dataset. For Cyprus and Israel, no fieldwork dates were available and it was impossible to determine which election the vote recall question referred to. For the Philippines, the variable measuring respondents' vote in the last election was missing. For France, the vote in last election variable measured only voter preferences in the first round of the last presidential election. For Poland it was unclear exactly which parties respondents voted for as response categories in the survey did not match choices available to voters. Finally, we excluded Bulgaria because political developments made it impossible to classify voters as being winners or losers. In that country, field work was conducted between February and May of 1997, but the government stepped down after protests in February of 1997 and was replaced by an interim government under the Mayor of Sofia until elections were held in April.
57. Cf. Piotr Kwiatkowski, 'Opinion Research and the Fall of Communism: Poland 1981-1990', International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 4 (1992), 358-74.
58. Edward N. Muller, Aggressive Political Participation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). See also Muller and Opp, 'Rational Choice and Rebellious Collective Action'. Because the repertoire of political action changed in the aftermath of the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the term 'unconventional participation' became less common as a description of various political acts outside of voting. Given that many of the acts that were considered unconventional have become conventional, we use the term 'protest potential' throughout this article.
59. Following Muller and Opp ('Rational Choice and Rebellious Collective Action'), the composite participation potential variable is defined as the product of behaviour and intention, where behaviour is scored 1 for lack of participation and 2 for participation, and intention is scored 1 for negative intention, 2 for conditionally positive intention, and 3 for unconditionally positive intention. While this means that the dependent variable is weighted more towards measuring intentions than actual behaviour, note also that questions asking about actual anti-government activities may underestimate people's proclivities to engage in protest in new democracies because citizens in these countries are less accustomed to reporting anti-government activities. Thus, the 'would' component of the protest index may help capture some of the 'did' activities citizens are reluctant to report, and we believe that an index composed of 'would' and 'did' responses is superior to one constituted solely of one of them. Put another way, using only the "did" responses for our analysis is likely to lead to less valid inferences regarding protest behaviour. Overall, 16.7 per cent of respondents in our sample report having attended protest meetings, while 61.3 per cent indicated they would. Similarly, 14.3 per cent of respondents said they had attended protest demonstrations, while 48.9 per cent said they would do so.
60. A constant equal to the number of items was subtracted from the total score in order to set the origin at zero.
61. The measure of minority-majority status may suffer from the potential problem of biased recall or over-reports favouring the victorious party or in our case under-reports of having voted for the losers (cf. Gerald C. Wright, 'Errors in Measuring Vote Choice in the National Election Studies, 1952-88', American Journal of Political Science, 37 (1993), 291-316). This problem may be particularly acute because our surveys are not election surveys and the countries therefore had gaps of varying length between the last election and the conduct of the survey. As a check on the accuracy of the reported vote, we compared the aggregate distributions of actual election outcomes and recalled election outcomes. In our sample, 41.9 per cent of respondents reported voting for the losing parties in their countries; this is slightly higher than the 39. 3 per cent of actual citizens of voting age who voted for the losing parties. That is, over-reporting is actually slightly more pervasive than under-reporting at a magnitude of about 2.6 percentage points. While this could lead to misrepresenting the true effects of political minority status, such a distortion is likely to be minimal given the small differences between sample and actual population. Another source of bias could exist if voters who have a higher level of protest potential would over-(under-)report their vote for the losing parties. If such a bias exists, there should be a relationship between levels of protest potential and over-(under-)report of the vote for losers. We therefore calculated the difference between the reported and the actual vote in a country and correlated this figure (a measure of over-report or under-report of the losing vote) with the levels of protest potential. This correlation was statistically insignificant: Pearson's r= -0.2 (p = 0.4).
62. Because not all surveys were conducted in 1996 (e.g., the New Zealand survey was conducted in 1997), countries' democratic histories varied between three years (Russia) and forty-seven years (New Zealand), with all the established democracies clustering at over forty years of democracy.
63. There is a conceptual and empirical distinction between policy dissatisfaction with the current government and dissatisfaction because the voter's party did not get to form the government. Policy dissatisfaction is likely to be rooted in partisanship or ideology. Yet, while partisanship and ideology are long-standing predispositions that have their origins in early socialization experiences and have been shown to be quite stable during people's lifetimes, winning and losing vary as a function of how elections come out. Moreover, it is possible to be on the losing side of an election yet also have one's policy preferences implemented. To account for the impact of partisanship/ideology on protest potential in multivariate estimations, we included variables measuring people's left-right ideology and ideological extremism. Including these variables allows us to see whether being on the left or the right makes people more likely to protest (depending on who is in government). Moreover, given that governments (and governing coalitions) tend to be located near the median voter, we sought to estimate whether those outside the political mainstream - that is, those on the political extremes - are more likely to deny consent and try to bring about change or mobilize for it.
64. Following the argument that participation enhances feelings of trust and external efficacy (and vice versa) (cf. Steven E. Finkel, 'Reciprocal Effects of Participation and Political Efficacy: A Panel Analysis', American Journal of Political Science, 29 (1985), 891-913), we included a variable distinguishing voters and non-voters to control for differences attributable to having participated in the election. We expect that those who did not participate in the election (coded 1) will have more negative attitudes towards the political system than those who did (coded 0).
65. We suspect that the satisfaction variable in part captures policy dissatisfaction as well.
66. The ISSP surveys used here did not furnish variables measuring people's perceptions of economic performance. Thus, to the extent that economic perceptions deviate from objective reality, our estimates of the 'true' economic effects may be biased. To get a rough sense of how well objective economic conditions match up with economic evaluations, we constructed a dataset that included the West European countries included in our sample (comparable data were not available for the other countries). Using survey data drawn from the Eurobarometer and objective economic indicators for 1991-95, the Pearson correlation of growth and retrospective evaluations of national economy is robust and statistically significant: 0.68 (p < 0.01); the correlation of growth and retrospective evaluations of personal financial situation is similarly strong: 0.67 (p < 0.01).
67. Anthony S. Bryk and Stephen W. Raudenbush, Hierarchical Linear Models (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1992).
68. Marco R. Steenbergen and Bradford S. Jones, 'Modeling Multilevel Data Structures', American Journal of Political Science, 46 (2002), 218-37. We used MLwiN 1.10.0006 (2000) to estimate these models.
69. In part, this may be due to the correlations among the country-level indicators; for example, it is well established that democratic age and levels of freedom are correlated.
70. In part, this may be due to the fact that the models that include the ideology variables are based on a smaller sample of countries, as Italy, Latvia and Spain are excluded from these estimations due to the non-availability of these variables for these countries.
71. See also Anderson et al., Losers' Consent.
72. Anderson and O'Connor, 'System Change, Learning, and Public Opinion About the Economy';
73. James L. Gibson, 'Political and Economic Markets: Changes in the Connections Between Attitudes Toward Political Democracy and a Market Economy Within the Mass Culture of Russia and Ukraine', Journal of Politics, 58 (1996), 954-84;
74. Mishler and Rose, 'Learning and Re-Learning Regime Support';
75. Whitefield and Evans, 'The Russian Election of 1993'.
76. Havard Hegre, Tanja Ellingsen, Scott Gates and Niels Gleditsch, 'Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816-1992', American Political Science Review, 95 (2001), 33-48.
77. Christian Davenport, 'From Ballots to Bullets: An Empirical Assessment of How National Elections Influence State Uses of Political Repression', Electoral Studies, 16 (1997), 517-40;
78. Helen Fein, 'More Murder in the Middle: Life Integrity Violations and Democracy in the World, 1987', Human Rights Quarterly, 17 (1995), 170-91.
79. Cf. Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times;
80. Gretchen Casper and Michelle M. Taylor, Negotiating Democracy: Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).
81. Steven E. Finkel, 'Civic Education and the Mobilization of Political Participation in Developing Democracies', Journal of Politics, 64 (2002), 994-1020.
82. Christopher J. Anderson and Yuliya V. Tverdova, 'Corruption, Political Allegiances, and Attitudes Toward Government in Contemporary Democracies', American Journal of Political Science, 47 (2003), 91-109;
83. Christopher J. Anderson, Silvia Mendes and Yuliya V. Tverdova, 'Endogenous Economic Voting: Evidence from the 1997 British Election', Electoral Studies, 23 (2004), 683-708.