Does the Election Winners-Losers Gap Extend to Subjective Health and Well-Being?

Political scientists have studied extensively the gap between winners and losers of democratic elections with regard to satisfaction with democracy and other political attitudes. In this article, we ask whether the winners-losers gap extends beyond the political domain to subjective health and well-being as well. Building on insights from biology and coalitional psychology, we identify relevant mechanisms and hypothesize that winning and losing elections could affect one’s outlook on life, happiness and subjective health. We comprehensively test these theoretical propositions with cross-sectional data from the 2012 and 2018 waves of the European Social Survey. We document significant gaps between winners and losers with respect to measures of subjective personal well-being. The gap is much bigger for citizens with strong party attachments, suggesting that those citizens who are strongly invested in the political game are most vulnerable to detrimental consequences of losing, but also most prone to reap the social and psychological effects of winning. To further probe the causal nature of these winner-loser effects, we trace changes in well-being following election wins and losses using a panel dataset from the Netherlands, where we find weaker supportive evidence. Overall, our results suggest that winning and losing democratic elections can have much wider-reaching consequences than previously recognized. Insights from cognitive and social psychology, biology, and physiology can extend further our theoretical understanding of citizens’ responses to political processes.