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Replication Data for "How to be gracious about political loss – The importance of good loser messages in policy controversies"

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for "How to be gracious about political loss – The importance of good loser messages in policy controversies"
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AZGPQO
 
Creator Esaiasson, Peter
Arnesen, Sveinung
Werner, Hannah
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Accepting defeat in political decision-making is crucial for the health of democracies. At the same time, being a good loser is challenging. How can citizens be motivated to be gracious about various types of political loss? In this paper we study whether political leaders can play an important role in boosting the perceived quality of decision-making processes among losers in policy conflicts. We propose and test the impact of a simple intervention post-decision: good loser messages delivered by co-partisan leaders that remind citizens about the rules of the game. Three survey experiments on probability samples of the Norwegian and Swedish population (total n =4700) show that good loser messages can indeed boost the process evaluations of policy losers. These findings emphasize the potential of procedural messaging to build loser’s consent between elections.
 
Subject Social Sciences
legitimacy
winner-loser gap
policy controversies
survey experiment
concession speeches
democratic innovations
de-biasing
forbearance
 
Contributor Arnesen, Sveinung