Determinants of Citizens’ Acceptance of Salient Policy Decisions: A Meta-Analysis

Citizens’ acceptance of political decisions is vital to democratic resilience, particularly when outcomes of those decisions conflict with their preferences. This dynamic is commonly known as losers’ consent, yet existing research has largely confined it to the context of elections. Far less is known about how losers’ consent operates in relation to policy decisions, which are often personally consequential and typically adopted without direct citizen participation. This study reconceptualizes losers’ consent in the policy domain through a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature on citizens’ willingness to accept policy decisions. I employ a PRISMA approach encompassing over 20,000 articles across political science, economics, and public health, to map how policy acceptance and related constructs are conceptualized and measured. I then estimate pooled meta-analytic effects for three central drivers of citizens’ willingness to accept policy decisions: (1) individual-level characteristics, (2) the personal relevance of decisions, and (3) political and affective polarization. By synthesizing the literature and identifying drivers of policy acceptance, this study provides an empirical foundation for extending losers’ consent beyond elections and reframes it as a core concept of democratic legitimacy in policymaking.