Does Political Competition Moderate the Effect of Election Winners Being Less Supportive to Checks and Balances than Losers? Re-Analyzing the Winner-Loser-Theorem in Combination with the Insurance Thesis

The Winner-Loser-Theorem (WLT) assumes that voters of parties that make it into government are more satisfied with democracy than voters of parties that have to go into opposition. Ample evidence has been provided for the theorem and the transfer to other concepts of political support has been successful. Mazepus and Toshkov (2022) showed that the WLT also works for normative preferences about checks and balances. However, the direction of the effect is reversed, as winners prefer fewer restrictions on the executive than losers. Regarding the trust in the judiciary and other horizontal veto points, I also expect a reverse effect: Winners suspect them of being blockers, often demonized by anti-democratic actors as strongholds of the old elites, whereas losers entrust judicial control with the preservation of the status quo. A particular scenario exists when anti-democratic actors dissolve checks and balances, as is often the case with democratic backsliding. Trust in the judiciary then only falls if these reforms are seen as negative. On the other hand, trust could increase despite the reduction in horizontal accountability if the reforms reduce judicial control, which have been perceived as too strong, to an acceptable level or if the judiciary is simply seen as corrupted. Models must include these factors on the macro and micro level. Since, to my knowledge, there is no analysis that explicitly examines the winner-loser theorem for trust in the judiciary in relation to competing factors, this will be the first objective of the paper. The insurance thesis originally formulated the assumption that political actors in the government are more likely to promote (or at least not to dismantle) judicial constraints on the executive if they fear to lose governmental power in the future. If they expect to lose governmental power, the checks and balances ensure their afterlife in the opposition. I transfer the insurance thesis to the micro level and combine it with the WLT in the role of a moderator. If supporters expect their preferred party to remain in government in the future, this reinforces their agreement with reforms dismantling checks and balances. On the contrary, election winners fearing future electoral defeat may be skeptical about the dismantling of checks and balances. Consequently, electoral competition and the likelihood of electoral turnover may potentiate or marginalize the WLT effect on diffuse and specific support for judicial constraints on the executive. In contrast to most existing studies on the insurance thesis, my sample is restricted to democracies. I apply multilevel modeling to inspect the macro-micro cross-level interactions between the political structure, electoral competition, and political attitudes. The analysis of diffuse support for checks and balances is restricted to data of the European Social Survey (round 6 and 10, 2012 and 2020). The analysis of specific support for the judiciary (trust in courts) can be extended to other regional and international surveys. I test several existing and new measures for political competition, which include the historical experiences as stocks and try to link them with the micro level.