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

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.

在政治决策中接受失败对民主制度的健康运转至关重要。与此同时，做一名“体面的失败者（good loser）”并非易事。如何激励公民对各类政治失利保持宽容大度？本文旨在探究政治领袖是否能在提升政策冲突中失利方对决策过程感知质量方面发挥重要作用。我们提出并检验了一项决策后的简单干预措施的效果：由同党派领袖传递的“体面失败者”信息（good loser messages），此类信息旨在提醒公民铭记游戏规则。针对挪威和瑞典人口概率样本开展的三项调查实验（总样本量n=4700）表明，“体面失败者”信息确实能提升政策失利方对决策过程的评价。这些发现凸显了程序性信息（procedural messaging）在选举间期构建失利方认同方面的潜力。