On the Subjectivity of the Experience of Victory: Who Are the Election Winners?

Elections represent key moments in democratic countries, and an established finding from the existing literature is that winners of elections display higher levels of satisfaction with democracy. Yet we know almost nothing about the times when voters feel like winners of an election. Using panel data in four countries, this article finds that while the objective performance of the supported party—measured using vote share and changes in vote share from the previous election—has a very important effect on feeling like an election winner, prior expectations regarding the election’s outcome as well as preferences for the supported party significantly moderate the effect of party performance on voter feelings. It seems also that the identification of the winners and losers of elections are clearer in majoritarian‐style democracies than in proportional systems with coalition governments. Ultimately, the findings indicate that measuring who are the winners of an election using exclusively objective measures of party performance may provide a distorted view of public opinion following the elections.     

Ballot Photographs as Cues in Low‐Information Elections

In low‐information elections, voters are often faced with the task of choosing from a list of unknown candidates. By examining a set of low‐information elections where candidate photographs were displayed on the ballot, we test how first impressions of candidates can influence election outcomes. We find that attractive candidates are more likely to be attributed the qualities associated with successful politicians and these trait inferences, based on facial appearances, influence the outcomes of elections. We also find that these trait inferences are based on physical characteristics of the candidates, such as age, race and ethnicity, evident from a photograph. Therefore, first impressions can be important determinants of election outcomes, especially in low‐information elections.     

Attributions for Presidential Elections: The Situational Shift Over Time

Two investigations examined attributions for the outcomes of presidential elections. The first experiment examined attributions made by editorial writers for presidential elections from 1964 to 1984. The writers tended to make personal attributions for the causes of the election outcome a few days after the election, but shifted to primarily situational attributions 2 to 3 years later. Subjects in the second experiment were surveyed through a random-digit dialing procedure either a few days after the 1988 presidential election or 1 year later and asked why the election turned out the way it did. A shift toward more situational explanations over time was found, but not among those who had voted for the winning candidate. This latter finding illustrates a limitation of the situational shift effect.     

A Test of the Knew-It-All-Along Effect in the 1984 Presidential and Statewide Elections1

The knew-it-all-along effect is investigated by comparing pre- and post-election predictions of subjects concerning three electoral races in the November 1984 elections. The results revealed that when the outcomes of the predictions are known, subjects recall having assigned higher probabilities and percentages to the actual winners of each election, remember having more confidence in the accuracy of these percentages, and claim to have had more knowledge of the candidates than they had before the election. The results were consistent across all three elections and in both repeated-measures and between-pups designs, suggesting that the knew-it-all-along effect is a very robust one. Two underlying processes are hypothesized to account for these results: the availability heuristic and an increase in confidence explanation.     

The Effects of US Presidential Elections on Work Engagement and Job Performance

We predicted that presidential election results would spill over to influence the work domain. Individuals who voted for the winning candidate were expected to experience increased engagement, whereas individuals who voted for the losing candidate were expected to experience decreased engagement. We tested these predictions within the context of the 2016 US presidential election. Using a sample of 232 working Americans, work engagement and job performance were assessed one week prior to the election, the day after the election, and one week after the election. Contrary to our prediction, individuals who voted for Trump (the winning candidate) did not report increased work engagement, thereby providing no evidence of positive spillover. However, individuals who voted for Clinton (the losing candidate) were less engaged on the day after the election compared to baseline, demonstrating negative spillover. Downstream, work engagement was positively related to job performance. However, these effects were relatively short-lived, as engagement returned to baseline levels within one week following the election. Our results suggest that elections can have important implications for work-related outcomes. From a practical perspective we suggest that to the extent possible it may be prudent to avoid scheduling important work tasks for the days following presidential elections.     

The Impact of Election Outcome on the Display of Political Posters: A Field Study During Communal Elections in Flanders

The present field study was designed to test the relationship between the election outcomes of political parties and the post-election display of posters in favor of those parties. Two days before the Flemish communal elections on 8 October 2000, addresses of private houses in the community of Zele were registered that displayed at least one poster in support of a political party (N = 388). On the day after the elections, two observers checked whether the registered houses still displayed their poster(s). A strongly and positively linear relation was found between the proportional win/loss of each political party (compared with the previous elections) and the percentage of houses that continued to exhibit poster(s) in support of that party: The better the election result, the higher the proportion of houses that still displayed their poster(s).     

Orthodoxy and Modernity in Cyprus: The 2006 Archepiscopal Elections in Historical Perspective

This article offers an analysis of the 2006 Archepiscopal elections of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus (OCC). It uses this analysis to develop an interpretation of the OCC's evolution over the last two centuries. Unlike other Orthodox churches, it is the laity and the clergy—through a system of proxy voting—that elect the OCC's high clergy. In the 2006 elections, the first contested elections since 1950, the contenders and the public divided into mainstream modernizers and traditionalists. The election of Chrysostomos II signifies continuation with the OCC's conventional interventionist role in the island's social, economic, and political life. The election also led to the creation of additional eparchies, which suggests the normalization of the OCC's organizational structures. These developments point to a conventional pattern of coexistence between Orthodox religious institutions and modernization. Therefore, the Cyprus case casts doubt on scholarly arguments advocating Eastern Orthodox Christianity's exceptionalism vis-à-vis Western Christianity.     

The Wished‐For Always Wins Until the Winner Was Inevitable All Along: Motivated Reasoning and Belief Bias Regulate Emotion During Elections

How do biases affect political information processing? A variant of the Wason selection task, which tests for confirmation bias, was used to characterize how the dynamics of the recent U.S. presidential election affected how people reasoned about political information. Participants were asked to evaluate pundit‐style conditional claims like “The incumbent always wins in a year when unemployment drops” either immediately before or immediately after the 2012 presidential election. A three‐way interaction between ideology, predicted winner (whether the proposition predicted that Obama or Romney would win), and the time of test indicated complex effects of bias on reasoning. Before the election, there was partial evidence of motivated reasoning—liberals performed especially well at looking for falsifying information when the pundit's claim predicted Romney would win. After the election, once the outcome was known, there was evidence of a belief bias—people sought to falsify claims that were inconsistent with the real‐world outcome rather than their ideology. These results suggest that people seek to implicitly regulate emotion when reasoning about political predictions. Before elections, people like to think their preferred candidate will win. After elections, people like to think the winner was inevitable all along.     

Factors affecting the birth and death of mutual-help groups: The role of national affiliation,professional involvement,and member focal problem

Examined the predictive relationship of three variables to the birth and death of mutual-help groups for a statewide New Jersey sample of 3,152 groups over a 2-year period. The three variables studied were group affiliation with a national mutual-help organization, local professional involvement in group activities, and group members' type of focal problem. Log-linear logit analysis revealed that the best-fitting model included Affiliation Status x Professional Involvement, and Affiliation Status x Focal Problem interactions. Among unaffiliated groups, professional involvement was related to lower group mortality, while among affiliated groups it was related to higher group mortality. Unaffiliated behavior control groups had higher odds for mortality and for birth than either unaffiliated life stress groups or unaffiliated medical groups. Among main effect findings, unaffiliated groups had consistently higher odds for birth than affiliated groups. The implications for research and action are discussed.     

Simple method for predicting American presidential greatness from victory margin in popular vote (1824-1996)

The author tested the simple method (SM) for predicting presidential greatness from the winner's victory margin in the popular vote and A. M. Schlesinger Jr.'s (1986) cycles of American political history with the expert sample presidential rankings of W. J. Ridings Jr. and S. B. McIver (1997). The SM, which involves only simple calculations on minimal data available shortly after an election, predicts greatness ratings that are above average for winners with high victory margins in years of public purpose and for winners with low victory margins in years of private interest. Also, the SM predicts ratings that are below average for winners with low victory margins in public purpose years and for winners with high victory margins in private interest years. Based on the data for 42 elections from 1824 to 1996, the SM success rate was 81.0% for all elections, 85.2% for the 27 1st-term elections, 86.2% for elections after 1880, and 94.4% for 1st-term elections after 1880. Chi-square analyses showed all percentages significant at the .001 level.     

Democracy and the Church of Sweden

The Church of Sweden was democratized in the 1930s when party politics was introduced into church elections. Since then, party politics have more and more been part of the governing style of the Church of Sweden. In 2000 the church was disestablished and a new election system was introduced with direct elections to the General Synod. The system of political parties remained. This article questions the democracy of the church using criteria for democratic structures. It also focuses on the role of the ordained ministry in the governance of the church, as the bishops have not been full members of the Synod since 1982. The conclusions are that the Church of Sweden is not fully democratic since participation in elections is at about 10% and the electorate has few chances to understand what the elections are about. The bishops’ weak formal position in the Synod is not in accordance with the teachings of the church on episcopacy. The conflict between democratic principles, inherited from the Swedish constitution, and church teaching on the ordained ministry and its role has not been fully resolved so far.     

Individual unionization decisions: a multilevel model of cost-benefit influences

An important part of the unionization process is predicting the individual's vote for or against union representation. We proposed and tested a multilevel model based on the relative importance of costs and benefits of representation. Regression statistics from within-person analyses were used to show the influence of perceived costs and benefits on judgment policies about intent to vote in a representation election. Using these statistics as outcome variables, between--person analyses were used to show the influence of decision frame on cost-benefit influences, in which framing a vote as one for or against the union was conceived as a contextual variable in an election. Results were used to extend prior unionization research and to suggest how employers and unions may attend to framing effects in an election.     

Predicting Election Outcomes from Positive and Negative Trait Assessments of Candidate Images

Conventional wisdom, and a growing body of behavioral research, suggests that the nonverbal image of a candidate influences voter decision making. We presented subjects with images of political candidates and asked them to make four trait judgments based solely on viewing the photographs. Subjects were asked which of the two faces exhibited more competence, attractiveness, deceitfulness, and threat, which are arguably four of the most salient attributes that can be conveyed by faces. When we compared our subjects' choices to the actual election outcomes, we found that the candidates chosen as more likely to physically threaten the subjects actually lost 65% of the real elections. As expected, our findings support the conclusions of Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, and Hall (2005 ) by showing a positive correlation between the competence judgments and the real election outcomes. Surprisingly, attractiveness was correlated with losing elections, with the effect being driven by faces of candidates who looked politically incompetent yet personally attractive. Our findings have implications for future research on negative political communication, as they suggest that both threatening first impressions and fleeting impressions of attractiveness can harm a candidate's electoral chances.     

Hindsight bias in political elections

Two studies on political hindsight bias were conducted on the occasions of the German parliament election in 1998 and the Nordrhein-Westfalen state parliament election in 2000. In both studies, participants predicted the percentage of votes for several political parties and recalled these predictions after the election. The observed hindsight effects were stronger than those found in any prior study on political elections (using percentage of votes as the dependent variable). We argue that the length of the retention interval between original judgement and recollection is mainly responsible for this difference. In our second study, we investigated possible artifacts in political hindsight biases using a control-group design where half of the participants recalled their predictions shortly before or after the election. Hindsight bias was preserved, reinforcing the results of earlier studies with non-control-group designs. Finally, we discuss the possibility that the hindsight experience (in political judgement and in general) actually consists of three different, partly independent components.     

Hindsight bias in political elections

Two studies on political hindsight bias were conducted on the occasions of the German parliament election in 1998 and the Nordrhein-Westfalen state parliament election in 2000. In both studies, participants predicted the percentage of votes for several political parties and recalled these predictions after the election. The observed hindsight effects were stronger than those found in any prior study on political elections (using percentage of votes as the dependent variable). We argue that the length of the retention interval between original judgement and recollection is mainly responsible for this difference. In our second study, we investigated possible artifacts in political hindsight biases using a control-group design where half of the participants recalled their predictions shortly before or after the election. Hindsight bias was preserved, reinforcing the results of earlier studies with non-control-group designs. Finally, we discuss the possibility that the hindsight experience (in political judgement and in general) actually consists of three different, partly independent components.     

Designing Political Campaigns to Elect a Candidate: Toward A Social Psychological Theory of Voting Behavior

A social psychological theory of voting behavior was developed in the context of designing political campaigns to elect a candidate. This theory was tested in the context of a presidential, senatorial, and congressional election. In general, the data were consistent with the theory across all three elections and individual difference variables. Implications for the design and evaluation of political campaigns were developed.     

Predicting Voting Choice from Within- versus Across-Subject Attitudes

The relationship of attitudes to both intentions and behavior was investigated in the context of the 1984 presidential election. Davidson and Morrison's (1983) within-subject approach (where an individual's attitudes toward alternative intentions and behaviors are the predictors) was compared to the more typical across-subject approach (where extremity of attitude across subjects is the predictor). Prior to the election, 45 American, undergraduate, registered voters indicated their attitudes and voting intentions toward the presidential candidates. Following the elections voting behavior was assessed. Phi coefficients indicated that an expectancy-value index of attitudes was more closely related to both behavioral intentions and voting behavior with a within- rather than an across-subject analysis (Phi coefficients of .59 & .73 versus .45 & .45 respectively).     

Stolen elections: How conspiracy beliefs during the 2020 American presidential elections changed over time

Conspiracy beliefs have been studied mostly through cross-sectional designs. We conducted a five-wave longitudinal study (N = 376; two waves before and three waves after the 2020 American presidential elections) to examine if the election results influenced specific conspiracy beliefs and conspiracy mentality, and whether effects differ between election winners (i.e., Biden voters) versus losers (i.e., Trump voters) at the individual level. Results revealed that conspiracy mentality kept unchanged over 2 months, providing first evidence that this indeed is a relatively stable trait. Specific conspiracy beliefs (outgroup and ingroup conspiracy beliefs) did change over time, however. In terms of group-level change, outgroup conspiracy beliefs decreased over time for Biden voters but increased for Trump voters. Ingroup conspiracy beliefs decreased over time across all voters, although those of Trump voters decreased faster. These findings illuminate how specific conspiracy beliefs are, and conspiracy mentality is not, influenced by an election event.     

Electoral Politics and Immigration in Canada: How Does Immigration Matter?

The conventional wisdom about the relationship between immigration and national electoral politics in Canada, albeit based on limited research, is that immigration is non-partisan and does not feature prominently during election campaigns. This paper examines the last two federal elections, in 2004 and 2006, employing a multi-pronged approach to party platform, media and survey analysis, in order to determine if immigration is discussed and, if so, how. It finds a political debate does take place but is not easily discernible using traditional research methods. This discourse is framed in terms of alternatives of inclusion, and not exclusion, something facilitated by the complexity of the Canadian immigration programme and the geographical and political landscape, and appears to be especially evident during more competitive elections.     

Popular Perceptions of Shari‘a Law in Nigeria

After years of brutal authoritarian rule, a window of opportunity opened and Nigeria successfully held democratic elections in 1999. The election forced leaders of the Hausa ethnic group to relinquish power after nearly twenty years at the helm. In an attempt to demonstrate their political power and influence, some states in the northern part of the country implemented Shari'a in the months following the national election that witnessed the victory of Olusegun Obasanjo. Although there have been several works that examine the issue of Shari‘a, such studies have not examined the subject taking public opinion data into account. Afrobarometer data collected in Nigeria in 2001 and 2007 give unparalleled insight into how Nigerians view Shari‘a law and how these views have changed over time.