From Sore Losers to Overly Optimistic Winners: The Winner–Loser Gap in Times of Democratic Backsliding

Research has consistently demonstrated the existence of a winner–loser gap in voter satisfaction with democracy. Most studies on this phenomenon emphasize the dangers posed by sore losers, raising concerns about their willingness to protest, obey laws, or accept electoral defeat. However, the potential risks of overly optimistic winners remain largely overlooked. Drawing on insights from social psychology, this paper develops and tests a theory of how overly optimistic winners can become entangled in a mutually reinforcing dynamic with democratic backsliding. When incumbents engage in undemocratic practices, winners and losers interpret these actions asymmetrically. Motivated reasoning and partisan cue-taking lead losers to recognize democratic decline and reduce their satisfaction, while winners rationalize or overlook these developments. As a result, the winner–loser gap widens and becomes increasingly driven by excessive satisfaction among winners. This dynamic weakens vertical accountability, allowing incumbents to avoid punishment and facilitating further democratic erosion. While theoretically straightforward, empirically examining these dynamics poses a significant methodological challenge. Demonstrating that the winner–loser gap widens under democratic backsliding is insufficient to establish whether this change reflects exaggerated dissatisfaction among losers, overly optimistic winners, or a combination of both. To address this problem, the paper introduces a novel methodological approach that benchmarks citizens’ satisfaction with democracy against expert-coded measures of democratic performance. This is achieved through a residual analysis in which democratic performance predicts satisfaction with democracy, and deviations from these predictions indicate distorted evaluations. By systematically comparing residuals among winners and losers, the analysis identifies which group’s attitudes move further away from what would be expected given actual democratic conditions. The study applies this approach using ten rounds of the European Social Survey across 33 European countries, merged with expert-coded democracy indicators from the Varieties of Democracy project and party-in-government information from V-Party. As a robustness check, the main findings are replicated using panel data from the Polish Citizen Panel. The results show that during periods of democratic backsliding, electoral losers adjust their satisfaction with democracy in line with declining democratic performance. Electoral winners, by contrast, not only fail to recognize democratic erosion but tend to become more satisfied with democracy than before. Consequently, the winner–loser gap widens and increasingly reflects excessive optimism among winners rather than dissatisfaction among losers, enabling incumbents to evade accountability when it matters most.