The effects of having voted for a winning/losing party on system support have in recent years been a frequent area of research. One link that has been missing in earlier research on winners/losers is the importance of quality of government (QoG), i.e. the extent to which government implement public policy impartially. We hypothesize that the negative effect on political support of voting for a losing party could be moderated by quality of government, both when it comes to individual perceptions and the actual performance of the political system. This hypothesis is tested on individual- and system-level data from the three modules of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (1996-2011), covering a broad range of European countries, from established western democracies to the more recent post-communist democracies.
