When You Win, Nothing Hurts: The Durability of Electoral Salience on Individuals’ Satisfaction with Democracy

There is a substantial literature on the impact of having voting for an electorally victorious party on individual voters’ satisfaction with democracy. Yet, there have been few evaluations as to temporally salient are elections to the satisfaction levels for those who voted for a “winning” party and those who voted for a “losing” party. Using rounds 1–8 of the European Social Surveys, I find evidence from 92 elections in 27 European countries that both the levels of and the difference between satisfaction levels of “winners” and “losers” do not attenuate quickly but rather last almost 5 years. That is, it appears that “winners” are more satisfied with democracy and stay that way. While this confirms earlier, smaller studies, the absence of a causal connection between the time from election and satisfaction levels poses a significant challenge to the current literature about the electoral mechanism of this relationship.