Obtaining losers’ consent after an election is often taken for granted in liberal democracies. However, it can pose a real challenge for any type of democratic decision-making in which participants hold conflicting views about the issues of the day. In this research note, we examine losers’ reactions to the votes taken in a citizen deliberative assembly. In such an assembly, much effort is devoted to informing the participants about the merits and limits of various options and ensuring that they form their own reasoned opinions about the issue. Based on this information, people are bound to reach different conclusions, and any vote on a specific option therefore generates winners and losers. While there is a large literature exploring the winner-loser gap in elections, we know little about how participants in a deliberative assembly react when they realize that the assembly chooses a different position than theirs. We leverage data from a citizen assembly held in Canada. We find a high degree of satisfaction with the conduct of the assembly, among both winners and losers.

The potential for participatory processes to address deficits in perceptions of legitimacy is strongly debated. This letter discusses how to evaluate the effects of participatory procedures. It argues that participatory processes should not be compared to normative ideals about how citizens should behave, but rather to the status quo of representative decision making. The authors use the example of winner–loser gaps in perceptions of fairness to illustrate the importance of evaluation frameworks, drawing on twelve experiments from the Netherlands and Sweden (total N = 5,352). The study shows that the choice of benchmarks matters substantially for the interpretation of process effects. When comparing participatory processes to the status quo of representative decision making, it finds higher fairness perceptions for a participatory process than for a representative process across all twelve experiments, even when the outcomes are unfavourable.

The literature on losers’ consent identifies clear distinctions in perceptions of democracy between electoral losers and winners. However, little of the literature addresses the complexities of mixed member electoral systems or compares this winner–loser divergence to that of non-voters. An analysis of post-election surveys in Germany in 2009 and 2013 allows for a disaggregation of types of losers and non-voters. Results find that voting for a district candidate from a losing party has a greater effect on perceptions than voting for a losing party in the proportional representation tier, while losing in both appeared to slow the decline in positive evaluations of the system. Meanwhile clear distinctions between perceptions of different types of non-voters emerge.

The conditions under which losers are willing to challenge the results of elections remain an open question. Using data from the Electoral Integrity Project for 66 democratic and non-democratic countries in 2012 and 2013, we measure how parties or candidates react once votes have been cast and one of them is declared the winner. Do they accept or challenge the results? This measure allows us to examine the causal mechanisms that account for the self-enforcing nature of democracies. Our findings show that losers’ consent increases with free and fair elections and in more economically developed countries, while income inequality is not relevant. Additionally, the impact of free and fair elections is particularly important in more economically developed countries.