Can policy incongruence explain the winner-loser gap in satisfaction with democracy? A comparative analysis of policy responsiveness in European democracies

While the loser-winner gap in perceptions of legitimacy has been extensively documented in the literature (e.g. Anderson et al. 2005), relatively little is known about the mechanisms that bring about this gap. One potential explanation is that losers (i.e. citizens who voted for parties that lost the election) are dissatisfied because they are less likely to obtain their preferred policies. But to what degree is that actually the case? To what degree is policy-making responsive to electoral losers? And can this potential policy incongruence explain the winner-loser gap in satisfaction with democracy? In this paper we evaluate to what degree policy making in Europe is more responsive to preferences of electoral winners as compared to preferences of electoral losers. We do so by linking multi-county survey data from the European Social Survey with Chapel Hill expert surveys and we take different definitions of electoral losing as well as political systems’ level of disproportionality into account.