From Headlines to Hostility: Media Coverage, Perceived Electoral Performance, and Implications for Political Intolerance

Research on the winner–loser gap finds electoral winners and losers systematically differ in attitudes central to democratic stability, including democratic satisfaction and institutional trust. The winner-loser gap also extends to social trust and even subjective well-being. However, this literature has largely relied on objective indicators of winning and losing, such as plurality vote-share or eventual government participation, which assumes citizens’ perceptions of electoral success and failure are direct reflections of these objective outcomes. Far less attention has been paid to how such perceptions are formed in the immediate aftermath of elections, particularly in proportional systems where outcomes are often ambiguous and coalition partners uncertain. This paper argues that post-election media coverage plays a central role in constructing interpretations of electoral success, failure, and political legitimacy, with downstream consequences for partisan-based political intolerance. Specifically, post-election media coverage provides citizens with cues about which parties are successful or unsuccessful, legitimate or obstructive, and deserving or undeserving of governing. These cues shape not only how citizens understand who has “won” or “lost,” but also the extent to which they are willing to restrict the civic and democratic liberties of their political opponents. We test these arguments using two post-election linkage studies surrounding the highly contested 2023 and 2025 Dutch general elections. In the first study (2023), we analyze equivalency frames in post-election coverage that emphasize parties’ electoral wins or losses and the association between exposure to these frames and perceptions of which parties had a “win” or “loss”. We examine whether perceiving one’s in-party as winning or losing, relative to perceptions of their out-party’s performance, is associated with support for restricting the civic and political rights of out-party supporters. In the second study (2025), we extend this approach to coalition possibilities, coding media frames that portray parties as legitimate participants, obstructive actors, or normatively inappropriate coalition partners. We link exposure to these frames to citizens’ evaluations of the fairness of parties’ participation in coalition negotiations and, in turn, to political intolerance toward both out-party elites and supporters. The results of this study will shed light on how even routine coverage of electoral outcomes can, on the one hand, shape citizens’ perceptions of democratic legitimacy and, on the other, potentially amplify partisan discrimination. Overall the findings have implications for how media navigate their responsibility in reporting electoral outcomes, particularly in contentious multi-party proportional systems.