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There have been only six French presidential elections between 1965 and 1995, but there has been considerable variation between these in the extent to which the candidates’ leadership attributes might have contributed to voter choice and electoral outcomes, and during the same period there has been an unusual degree of constancy in the nature and strength of the underlying social and political forces. The theme of this chapter is the collision between these two forces (transient candidate qualities and long–term electoral forces), but before this analysis is made, a brief account is given of how presidential elections are conducted in France. The main part of the chapter is an analysis of the six elections between 1965 and 1995: the 1965 de Gaulle election; the 1969 election won by Pompidou; the 1974 election won by Giscard d’Estaing; the 1981 and 1988 elections won by Mitterrand; and the 1995 election won by Chirac. Constraints on personal candidate appeal are then discussed, before presenting a further analysis of the 1988 election. The study focuses on the extent to which the traditional left–right dimension has affected the electorate’s behaviour and electoral outcome, and whether there were elections in which one candidate had a clear advantage over the other in terms of personal popularity or leadership attributes; the objective was to determine whether the left–right factor was weaker at elections where personal qualities were presumed stronger, and this hypothesis received some support from the analysis presented.

There has been a widespread belief in Britain in recent years (which appears to be corroborated by survey evidence) that leaders’ personalities strongly influence the way that people vote and therefore the results of elections, although in a parliamentary system such as Britain’s, this is less obviously correct than in presidential systems such as the United States, France and Russia. However, British political science has usually reached negative conclusions on this belief, pointing out that popular leaders have often lost elections, and that only two of the eleven elections fought since 1964 (those of 1964 and 1997) stand out as elections in which leaders’ personalities may have been decisive. This chapter looks at the 1997 election, for which three separate studies belonging to the British Election Study are available: the cross–sectional study, XBES; the campaign study, BECS; and the British Election Panel Study, BEPS. It first discusses the effect of leaders’ personalities by constructing a series of vote models, and then looks at the relationship between leaders’ personalities and the vote. Each of the three British Election Studies are then analysed; only the BEPS study (which has the least comprehensive data set) indicates that leaders’ personalities had anything other than a marginal effect on the election outcome.

The aim of this chapter is to provide a systematic test of the conventional wisdom that personality is key in contemporary American electoral politics. Using survey data from the six most recent presidential elections, the contours are examines of the candidates’ images (traits), the bases of those images in voters’ more fundamental political predispositions, and the impact of voters’ assessments of the candidates’ personal qualities on individual voting behaviour and on aggregate election outcomes. In stark contrast with the popular conception of contemporary electoral politics as candidate–centred and image–driven, it is argued that candidates’ images are largely epiphenomenal and have only a modest impact on election outcomes. This conclusion is underlined by the analysis given of the 2000 (Bush vs. Gore) presidential election, in which the estimated impact of voters’ assessments of the candidates’ personalities was even smaller than in the previous five elections considered here, although quite probably large enough to be decisive in an election decided by a few hundred votes in a single state.

Traces the dynamics of losers’ and winners’ attitudes about the political system along three dimensions—before and after an election, over the course of electoral cycles, and over long periods of time. The results show that winning or losing, once it occurs, has immediate but also lasting effects. New electoral losers (old winners) become less content with the political system. Conversely, new winners (old losers) become significantly more positive about the political system. These effects persist over the course of an electoral cycle and beyond, as losers remain consistently less satisfied than winners between elections. Finally, we show that repeated losing serves to increasingly undermine losers’ attitudes towards the political system—while losing once does not immediately serve to undercut losers’ attitudes towards government, losing twice starts a process that leads to a gradual erosion of support for a system that consistently fails to make them winners.

Provides an overview of the argument. Describes how elections produce unequal outcomes—for some to win, others have to lose. Also highlights the importance of losers’ consent for understanding political legitimacy. Losers’ consent is critical for democratic systems to function because losers are numerous; in part, it is important because of the incentives that losing creates. Also describes examples of graceful and sore losers in various countries around the world. Concludes by providing an alternative view of elections as institutional mechanisms that can enhance or diminish the legitimacy of political systems.

Although political scientists have recognized the importance of election outcomes for how people feel about the democratic political process for some time, few have systematically examined the effect of elections and election outcomes on people’s attitudes about government. Examines the underpinnings of what we call the ‘winner–loser gap’ in democratic legitimacy from several perspectives. First, it discusses how social scientists have approached the study of political legitimacy over the years as well as the major findings that have emerged from their efforts. Second, it explains the underlying premises for the winner–loser gap in legitimacy beliefs gleaned from different corners of the social sciences. Finally, we develop a model of losers’ consent that forms the theoretical core of our empirical investigation. This model demonstrates how election outcomes and the sorting of voters into winners and losers affects legitimacy beliefs.

This chapter considers the impact of felon disenfranchisement on election outcomes. It begins with an overview of the implications of incomplete suffrage rights for democratic practice. It is particularly important to note that felon disenfranchisement constitutes an unusual issue in the post-Voting Rights Act era, in which the question of group impacts becomes a relevant consideration. There is considerable evidence that felon voting restrictions have had a demonstrable impact on national elections. In this sense, rising levels of felon disenfranchisement constitute a reversal of the universalization of the right to vote.

Examines losers’ evaluations of electoral democracy. The data show that more losers are satisfied with the functioning of democracy than dissatisfied, an overwhelming majority believes that the most recent election was fair, and more losers say that parties care what ordinary people think than the opposite. We also find that losers’ evaluations of satisfaction and fairness are lower but evaluations of responsiveness higher in non-established democracies. We also find that losers evaluate all three aspects of electoral democracy more positively in countries with more proportional electoral systems. Moreover, our results indicate that losers in more developed countries are more satisfied with democracy but less positive in their assessments of the fairness of the most recent election. The analyses further indicate that supporters of losing parties that have never been in government are the most critical of representative democracy, while supporters of the major losing party that formed the government at the time of the election feel most positive.

This chapter addresses three main questions. First, the chapter considers what the partisan differential is between voters and nonvoters. It then asks which election outcomes would have changed party hands under universal turnout. This issue, of course, directly addresses the substantive political implications of any partisan bias in turnout. Finally, the chapter considers what factors could lead some states and elections to have a larger partisan differential—that is, a greater gap in the electoral preferences of voters and nonvoters. This chapter finds that, on average, nonvoters were slightly more Democratic than voters in each of these elections. However, the magnitude of the partisan differential varies across states and time.

While winning and losing are experienced by individuals and create a lens through which citizens view politics, in this chapter we examine whether individuals’ political predispositions, measured by partisanship and ideology, matter for how they view the system. We find that voters’ political predispositions heighten the effect of winning and losing, though they do not affect levels of winners’ and losers’ consent in all circumstances. In those cases where we find evidence of mediating effects, they point to such predispositions acting as amplifiers, rather than as buffers for the winner-–loser effect. Winners who are strongly attached to their political party express more positive appraisals of the political system’s performance than other winners. With regard to ideological extremism, we find that ideologues are particularly prone to view the system through the lens of winning and losing.

Investigates the gap in winners’ and losers’ attitudes with regard to different kinds of attitudes about the political system across established and newly emerging democracies. The results show that being in the political majority generally translates into more positive attitudes toward government, while losers have more negative attitudes toward the political system. We find that there usually is a gap in winners’ and losers’ sense of whether elections are fair, their evaluations of the performance of the political system, as well as feelings about whether government is responsive. Moreover, losing elections appears to diminish people’s support for democratic principles overall, and losers exhibit a heightened propensity to engage in political protest.

The authors examine how formal political institutions mute or amplify the impact of losing on attitudes toward the political system. They can do so in one of several ways: by defining the rules of the process by which losers are produced in the first place, usually through the electoral system; by determining the substance of government policy, and how close policy is to the preferences of the losers; and, finally, by determining the boundaries of how power, once allocated, can be exercised by the winners, that is, the constraints on the ability of the winners to bring about policy change. We find that specific institutions, and not just combinations of institutions, help to shape the response of losers. Losers express less negative views about the political system than winners when electoral rules are more proportional, when the political system has a greater number of veto players, and when power is shared within the political system. We also show that federalism allows losers some say in the system, and therefore helps make losers more positive towards the system.

Examines the question of whether electoral losers will try to change the rules of the game or will stop participating in politics altogether. Expectations of future loss are likely to have an important impact when citizens are asked to consider replacing the current status quo institutions with another set. Examining proposed and enacted institutional reforms in a variety of areas and countries, we find that losers by and large are more likely to support changes in institutional practices. The findings help to demonstrate that losing is an important part of the motor that drives institutional change. While losing does not presage a disaster or an abrupt end to democratic practices, it does seem to be one of the first steps in the direction of change and reform. One of the difficulties facing the design of democratic institutions is to have institutions that make losers, but not permanent losers, and to allow current losers some reasonable chance of winning in future periods.

This chapter considers how voters are different from nonvoters with respect to their demographic and ideological attributes, and if election outcomes would change if everyone voted. It first explains why vote misreporting presents a problem for studies of participatory bias. Then, the chapter introduces the vote validation study conducted as part of the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). It then compares voters to nonvoters along key demographic and attitudinal variables, using both CCES and ANES data. Here, the chapter shows how misreporting exaggerates the differences between voters and nonvoters, and it also addresses the problem with bias ratio measures. Finally, this chapter simulates higher voter turnout and shows that if more people voted, election results would hardly be affected at all.

Examines the dimensions of losers’ consent in old and new democracies. We expect that losing has stronger negative effects in new democracies relative to mature democracies since losers have not yet learned to lose in countries where democratic governance is of recent vintage. The results show that, with few exceptions, political losers have lower support levels than winners across all dimensions of political support, including beliefs in core principles of democracy. Moreover, we find that the winner–loser gap is more prominent in newly democratized and democratizing states. The data also indicate that the supporters of the old communist parties exhibit significantly lower levels of support for the democratic system than voters for other parties, and in particular, if they are not in power.

Are moderate parties rewarded in multiparty systems? Cross‐national analyses estimate the vote shares for approximately eighty parties across twelve Western European democracies. The results indicate that parties' vote shares increase with their proximity to the Center of the voter distribution, although the effects are relatively small. With respect to temporal shifts in vote share, additional results suggest that parties gain votes when public opinion (i.e., the mean voter) shifts in their direction between elections. These findings corroborate the theoretical results reported by Lin et al. (1999), and provide support for conclusions reported by other authors who rely on simulations of individual‐level data from national election surveys.

This chapter examines another way in which group characteristics influence election outcomes, which is by interacting with the broader political environment to produce different effects on outcomes in different political contexts. It revisits the underlying contextual argument and specifies a process that focuses on changes in party elite behavior, changes in popular perceptions of party elites, and changes in patterns of group-based determinants of state outcomes. It then provides empirical support for the model and demonstrates the ways in which the effects of demographic and political variables on election outcomes have evolved over time. Finally, it uses the changes in relationships over time to get a sense of how much these changes have affected outcomes and to assess the magnitude of these effects compared to the effects of changes in demographic characteristics.

Chapter 3 of Part I examined how storable votes affected outcomes when one group was consistently in the minority in all decisions. This chapter describes the formal model; proofs of Propositions 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3; and the derivation of Figure 3.1.

This chapter studies candidate selection and election outcomes in English municipalities. It confirms that parties are primarily interested in pursuing votes and think about the ideological repercussion later. In England, ward-level elections allow one to get a sense of how the distribution of Muslim and non-Muslim preferences affects parties' calculations of the anticipated gains and losses that they associate with Muslim inclusion. Studying thousands of ward elections over time, the chapter demonstrates that these calculations significantly influence parties' inclusion decisions. Parties are less likely to put Muslim candidates on the ticket in wards where they anticipate a considerable non-Muslim backlash. However, once the size of the Muslim electorate reaches a critical threshold, inclusion chances rise substantially.