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As a mechanism ensuring accountability of the governors to the governed, elections constitute one of the defining features of democracy. Election results shape government composition and policy outputs, most likely to the advantage of voters who support the winning parties. Previous studies have addressed the gap between electoral winners and losers on various dimensions of political support, from specific institutional evaluations to more diffuse aspects concerning democratic principles and procedures,1 and found that winners express significantly greater support than losers at each level. However, these works define winners and losers in a static fashion by examining their attitudes at only a single time-point, and employ a dichotomous categorization that does not capture possible variations within each group. In this study, we take into consideration both the past history of winning or losing on present attitudes, and the impact of ideological distance from the government on a commonly used indicator of political support, namely satisfaction with democracy.
Since winners stand behind parties or candidates currently holding the reins of power, it would come as no surprise that they express greater satisfaction with political authorities and institutions. As a corollary, one expects their satisfaction to decline if their parties lose power. However, in democratic polities winners have no stronger claim as 'owners' of the political system than losers, since by definition democratic elections permit the fortunes of both current winning and losing parties to fluctuate at the ballot box, and thus offer losers the possibility of winning in the future. It follows that a distinction exists not only between present winners and losers, but between voters who have previous (especially recent) experience of winning and those who do not. The former should express greater approval in the political system, even if their parties are currently in opposition, since the system has worked to their benefit, whereas the latter have little cause for satisfaction because their parties have long been excluded from power. In short, our study takes a dynamic view in defining winners and losers, taking into account not only present status but also experience in the recent past, and demonstrates that both current winners who had lost in the previous election and current losers who had won in the previous...