Fed-up with direct democracy? Losing popular votes, satisfaction with democracy and motivation to participate

It is long established in the extant literature that voting for the winning parties has a strong impact on voters’ perceptions and assessment of electoral institutions. In Swiss consensus democracy with its traditionally large governmental coalitions, the determination of electoral losers and winners is, however, notoriously difficult. Nevertheless, frequent popular votes allow a quite fine-grained measurement of the extent to which voters are actually on the losing or the winning side in political decision-making processes. In this paper, we analyse data from the June 2023 post-vote survey of the DDS21 project, in which we introduced a new indicator measuring the extent of losing or winning popular votes at the individual level. The aim of this empirical analysis is to explore the effect of frequently winning or losing popular votes on attitudes towards democracy and democratic institutions, as well as on motivation and likeliness to participate. In line with the literature on loser consent, we find that frequently losing in direct democracy is associated with lower levels of institutional trust. In addition, we show that the frequency of losing is positively related to the likelihood of participation in popular votes.