Electoral Chair’s Seminar – 24 April

Do Emotions Drive the Link Between Winning and Satisfaction with Democracy? Leveraging the Super Bowl, the World Cup, and The Lion King

Patrick Fournier-Université de Montréal

People who vote for electoral winners have higher levels of satisfaction with democracy than those who do not. The literature on this link posits a policy mechanism (winners become more satisfied because their party will form government and enact its electoral program), and an emotional mechanism (winners become satisfied because winning affects feelings that then impact satisfaction). However, research has not been able to disentangle the two mechanisms convincingly. To address this, we employ three pre-registered studies. Two studies exploit the outcome of the 2022 Super Bowl and the 2022 World Cup final. In each case, we interview several thousand people in the two regions/countries home to the participant football teams just before and just after each game. These respondents are exogenously separated into winning and losing groups based on the outcome of the game. These short-term panels allow us to estimate the causal effect of experiencing victory on satisfaction with democracy. The third study is a survey experiment where participants are randomly assigned to a view emotion-inducing excerpts of the animated movie The Lion King before expressing their satisfaction with democracy.

This content has been updated on 21 April 2024 at 12 h 44 min.