Assessing the Severity and Nature of Losers' Consent Erosion in Polarized Societies

Does the consent of losers erode when a disliked party wins the elections? Building upon evidence that losing an election reduces satisfaction with democracy (SWD) among voters who strongly dislike the winner, this paper makes three contributions. First, it implements a novel comparative regression-discontinuity-design to show that a disliked party win reduces SWD among all voters -not only radical and main opposition party supporters. Second, it leverages an original vignette experiment conducted in Austria before the 2024 election to show that the most disliked party win increases support for undemocratic behavior, confirming the losers' consent erosion hypothesis. Finally, it exploits forced-choice and open-ended questions to disentangle the competing mechanisms, with concerns about the winner breaking democratic norms having the greater impact. These findings contribute to our understanding of the losers' consent under conditions of affective polarization and shed light on the challenges established democracies face in avoiding backsliding.