IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cog/poango/v14y2026a11468.html

What Electoral Outcomes Foster Electoral Consent and Dissent?

Author

Listed:
  • André Blais

    (Department of Political Science, University of Montreal, Canada)

  • Damien Bol

    (Department of Political Science, Sciences Po Paris, France)

  • Carolina Plescia

    (Department of Government, University of Vienna, Austria)

Abstract

Losers’ consent is a key indicator of democratic vitality. In a functioning democracy, citizens should accept electoral outcomes regardless of which party wins. Contrasting with previous studies on the topic, we, in this article, directly measure the types of electoral outcomes to which over 5,000 German adults, representative of the national population, are willing to consent/dissent. We find that respondents are more likely to accept, and less likely to protest, outcomes in which their preferred party performs well, and their most disliked party performs poorly. Meanwhile, structural features of the outcomes, such as the number of parties in government or whether the Chancellor comes from the party with the most seats, have little to no effect. These results support the idea that partisanship is the main driver of electoral consent/dissent, and that negative preferences have a unique explanatory power in this respect.

Suggested Citation

  • André Blais & Damien Bol & Carolina Plescia, 2026. "What Electoral Outcomes Foster Electoral Consent and Dissent?," Politics and Governance, Cogitatio Press, vol. 14.
    • Handle: RePEc:cog:poango:v14:y:2026:a:11468
    DOI: 10.17645/pag.11468
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/11468
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.17645/pag.11468?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cog:poango:v14:y:2026:a:11468. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: António Vieira or IT Department (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cogitatiopress.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.