Losers’ consent: Evidence from a large-scale online experiment

Intrinsic support for democratic principles is difficult to capture given heterogeneity in how people interpret these principles and social desirability bias in survey responses. We introduce a novel behavioral measure based on the concept of losers' consent, a core idea in democratic theory capturing citizens' acceptance of election outcomes even when they lose. We implement our approach in a large-scale online experiment with over 2,000 participants forming a representative sample of the French population, where we elicit partisan preferences using monetary donations to real parties. After voting, we reveal the winning party and give participants the opportunity to accept or contest the election outcome. Results show that a majority accepts the outcome, even among losers, and those for whom accepting is not utility-maximizing, suggesting that citizens show strong adherence to the core democratic principle of losers' consent.