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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.

Summarizes the arguments made in the book about the impact of election outcomes on people’s attitudes about government and reviews the evidence assembled in the empirical chapters. Specifically, it reviews the differences in attitudes between those on the winning side of an election and those on the losing end across countries and individuals as well as over time. Also highlights the critical but underexamined role of losers in democratic politics. In addition, the chapter discusses the role of political institutions in understanding political behaviour. Finally, it calls on scholars to focusing on understanding the impact of elections and election outcomes on citizens’ attitudes and behaviour.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The chapter serves both as a brief biography of Balthasar and a protracted bibliography of his work. The consideration of Balthasar's monumental opus (The Glory of the Lord, Theo‐drama, and Theo‐logic) provides a critical “system” in which to read texts and begins to illustrate Balthasar's unique contribution to current discussions about the intersection between theology, history, philosophy, and narrative art. The chapter demonstrates that not only is Balthasar one of the most important Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, but also his work has practical contributions to make to discourses in critical theory. Like critical theory, Balthasar's work is theological, literary, anthropological, philosophical, psychological, political, and historical, which are critical theory's main components. In the spirit of the ressourcement theology that shaped him, Balthasar is primarily interested in renewing attention to older sources in order to critique the idealistic excesses of modernity. In this sense, Balthasar reveals a postmodern temperament: he too is concerned with issues of language and difference, with aporia, with plurality, with surplus, and with horizons of meaning, to name a few. The difference between Balthasar and the majority of critical theorists resides in ontological and theological orientation: it is therefore a difference of imagination and of grammar. The chapter elaborates on these and other dynamic relationships.

This chapter explores the uneven consequences of global environmental change and globalization for agriculture and rural livelihoods. The first part of the chapter examines two of the most far-reaching and transformative types of global change, namely climate change and trade liberalization. It then presents a detailed case study of the pathway of outcome double exposure in Indian agriculture. The case study shows that the outcomes of climate change and trade liberalization in India are not randomly distributed, but instead are systematically linked to contextual conditions that influence both exposure and capacity to respond to each process. Growing inequalities linked to both processes can be seen at the regional, district, and village levels, and across gender groups. Global environmental change and globalization processes together reinforce uneven outcomes among farmers and rural communities, creating both double winners and double losers.

Two recent studies have concluded that Supreme Court decisions can be anticipated by the behavior of justices during the oral arguments, specifically that in the vast majority of cases (85%–90%) the eventual losing side was asked more questions by the justices. But the conclusions of these studies were based on a limited number of cases (10 to 14). This chapter evaluates the claim by examining all the cases (70 to 80) in each of five terms and refining the definition of a “question.” The chapter finds that the side asked the most questions does lose more often (about 60% of the time), but not to the degree claimed in the earlier studies. The effect is much more salient in ideological cases than in nonideological ones.

This chapter proposes that persuasion is more effective in influencing votes in certain types of cases than others. A distinction is made between ideological (i.e., hot-button issue) cases and non-ideological cases. Using data from several recent Supreme Court terms, the chapter shows that latency of the decision, frequency of unanimous votes, and behavior in oral arguments are affected by type of case. In oral arguments, justices' eventual votes can be predicted from the nature and frequency of their questions, to a greater degree in ideological cases than in non-ideological cases. Thus it is concluded that both the legal model and the attitudinal model of judicial decision making are applicable, depending on the type of case.

Markets are efficient when prices coincide with intrinsic value. Heuristic‐driven bias and frame dependence combine to render markets inefficient. Representativeness leads to the winner–loser effect, whereby investor overreaction causes prior long‐term winners to become future long‐term losers, and prior long‐term losers to become future short‐term winners. Conservatism leads security analysts to underreact to earnings surprises, thereby generating short‐term momentum in stock prices. Frame dependence leads investors to frame stock returns in terms of short horizons instead of long horizons. As a result, investors require a larger equity premium than they would if they framed returns using longer horizons. Prices can deviate from fundamental value for long periods, with excess volatility the result.

The third theme of behavioral finance is inefficient markets. In recent years scholars have produced considerable evidence that heuristic‐driven bias and frame dependence cause markets to be inefficient. Scholars use the term “anomalies” to describe specific market inefficiencies. For this reason, Eugene Fama characterizes behavioral finance as “anomalies dredging.” This chapter discusses what behavioral finance implies about picking stocks and beating the market. Market efficiency is a direct challenge to active money managers, because it implies that trying to beat the market is a waste of time. Why? Because no security is mispriced in an efficient market, at least relative to information that is publicly available. Inside information may be another story. The chapter discusses whether the stock recommendations made by brokerage houses have beaten the market, and a series of effects discussed in the literature: the winner–loser effect, momentum, the size effect, the book‐to‐market effect, the effect of a change in analysts' recommendations.

No actor from a specific policy community is capable of controlling the relatively volatile but nonetheless necessary resource Political Support enjoyed by substantive policies. Hence, this chapter is structured differently from the other nine chapters dealing with the public action resources. Political Support consists of the primary legitimation (as opposed to the secondary legitimation delivered by the resource Consensus) by parliamentary bodies whose agendas cover hundreds of public policies which may be opposed. Thus, all three policy actor groups have a common interest in fighting this risk by means of common ‘external’ policy. This chapter illustrates the role of the resource Political Support and the modalities of its maintenance and use with examples from agricultural policy, energy policy and anti-money-laundering policy. It stresses the crucial role of third party winners and losers (actors positioned between the core policy actors and their environment), political parties and changes in the composition of the basic triangular structure of public policies. It demonstrates strategies deployed by each one of the three policy actor groups for recovering Political support.

This introductory chapter sets out the focus of the book, namely justices' obligations to constitutional losers. The goal is to engage ordinary citizens, as well as members of the legal profession, in a discussion of the legitimacy of judicial review. The chapter also discusses issues such as the legitimacy of judicial review, judicial activism, and the apparent indifference of justices to the harms inflicted on constitutional losers. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.