The scholarship on satisfaction with democracy has increased significantly in recent decades, with scholars investigating how democratic satisfaction influences political attitudes and behaviors as well as the individual and contextual determinants of citizens’ satisfaction with democracy. To our knowledge, however, scholars omitted to examine the democratic satisfaction of politicians. Making use of survey data from the Comparative Candidates Survey, this research note addresses this gap in the literature. As a first step in this endeavor, we pose two objectives. First, we want to compare levels of democratic satisfaction across citizens and politicians in different countries to evaluate whether mass-elite gaps are apparent. Second, we want to replicate core findings from the research on citizens but with politicians. As such, we examine two hallmark findings in the literature on democratic satisfaction with respect to the role of ideological extremism/nicheness and the winner-loser gap at elections. Our study contributes to the growing literature on elites’ attitudes and behaviors and identifies some of the conditions that favor and undermine politicians’ satisfaction with democracy. This is a crucial research endeavor given elites’ influence on public opinion and democratic stability.

Voters of governing parties are more satisfied with democracy than opposition voters, but the consequences of this winner-loser gap remain underexplored. We argue that electoral losers should be more supportive of referendums than electoral winners as representative democracy has failed electoral losers, whereas electoral winners aim to protect their party’s ability to govern without constraint. In addition, we theorize that affective polarization should strengthen this gap. Using cross-national survey data from thirteen European democracies, we find that electoral losers consistently show greater support for referendums than winners, and affective polarization amplifies this effect. Yet, the effect of affective polarization is solely attributed to a decrease in support for referendums among polarized election winners. These findings raise questions about the role of affective polarization in undermining the accountability mechanism between electoral winners and their parties. Concerns about electoral losers might be overstated and potentially overlook the democratic implications of electoral victory.

Obtaining losers’ consent after an election is often taken for granted in liberal democracies. However, it can pose a real challenge for any type of democratic decision-making in which participants hold conflicting views about the issues of the day. In this research note, we examine losers’ reactions to the votes taken in a citizen deliberative assembly. In such an assembly, much effort is devoted to informing the participants about the merits and limits of various options and ensuring that they form their own reasoned opinions about the issue. Based on this information, people are bound to reach different conclusions, and any vote on a specific option therefore generates winners and losers. While there is a large literature exploring the winner-loser gap in elections, we know little about how participants in a deliberative assembly react when they realize that the assembly chooses a different position than theirs. We leverage data from a citizen assembly held in Canada. We find a high degree of satisfaction with the conduct of the assembly, among both winners and losers.