The Surprised Loser The Role of Electoral Expectations and News Media Exposure in Satisfaction with Democracy

On Election Night 2012, the Fox News Channel projected U.S. President Barack Obama had won Ohio-and thus re-election-yet the cable news network had a problem. Karl Rove disagreed. Rove, a powerful Republican and Fox pundit, criticized the network's call as "premature" and put the Fox news anchors in an awkward position. On one side stood a leading political strategist who insisted Republican Party nominee Mitt Romney remained a viable candidate, while on the other side stood the network's own analysts who projected they were "99.9%" certain of the call. On air, Rove continued to disagree.1Rove was wrong, but he was not alone. When it comes to predicting a winner, people draw heavily on their own preferences. This preference-expectation link, called wishful thinking, is a robust cognitive and motivational bias found in domains ranging from sports to politics and spanning different countries.2 Put simply, people tend to predict their preferred party or candidate will be victorious, a biased perception so stubborn it often continues even in the face of correcting information. The focus here is not merely on a theoretically interesting effect, but rather on its contribution to our understanding of an unrelated, but long-running, body of scholarly work that posits a thriving democracy hinges not on the electoral winners but, rather, lies "in the hands of the losers."3 While scholars have identified differences between electoral winners and losers in their trust and satisfaction with democracy, they have been less successful in identifying the underlying individual-level causes of such gaps.4 Analyses below will examine a previously unexplored factor of losing, the surprised loser. The use of "surprised" in this instance signifies respondents who engaged in wishful thinking by expecting their losing candidate to win, as opposed to fellow supporters unsurprised by the election outcome. In addition, the role of exposure to news media, theoretically expected to improve knowledge about a campaign, is explored in two ways. First, while general news exposure should reduce wishful thinking and lead to less of a "surprise" in the electoral outcome, it is argued that exposure to partisan news media favorable to the losing candidate will actually increase this surprise and, as a consequence, result in even more negative perceptions of government and democracy.Literature ReviewWinners and LosersEveryone loves a winner, so goes the old saying, and electoral losers received little scholarly attention until 1983 when Riker subjected them to one of the earliest systematic analyses. He wrote,The dynamics of politics is in the hands of the losers. It is they who decide when and how and whether to fight on. Winners have won and do not immediately need to change things. But losers have nothing and gain nothing unless they continue to try to bring about new political situations.5In their follow-up, comprehensive analysis across democracies, Losers' Consent, Anderson and his colleagues echoed Riker, arguing that winning and losing are fundamental to understanding how people construct their political worlds and, more broadly, how their acceptance or rejection can influence the levels of support in the legitimacy of major democratic institutions.6 Indeed, the authors posit that "to say the functioning and the maintenance of democratic polities are intimately linked with what and how citizens think about democratic governance is perilously close to stating a tautology."7 This view flows naturally from the classic work of Easton, who positioned democratic legitimacy as resting on the extent to which people rely on their government to act appropriately in most instances.8 Studies in this tradition typically focus on either a macro or micro approach. At the macro level, research has found winner-loser gaps to be a function of differences between mature and emerging democracies,9 between elections that were close versus those that were not close,10 and whether analysis includes both presidential and congressional elections. …