Through free and fair elections, democracies enable citizens to decide who represents their interests in parliament. However, the outcome of an election creates `winners' and `losers' depending on which parties become part of the government. As a large corpus of literature demonstrates, belonging to the winners or losers of an election affects citizens' satisfaction with democracy.This gap in satisfaction levels can have important implications for the stability and legitimacy of democratic systems, as individuals who feel that they are not benefiting from democracy may be more likely to disengage from political participation or even support non-democratic alternatives.
Despite these concerns, we know very little about the question of how winning or losing an election affects voters' preferences for more specific forms of democratic representation. We address this research gap and analyse how the winner-loser status affects citizens' levels of populist attitudes and their sub-dimensions, i.e., anti-elitism and people-centrism. Based on a causal identification strategy using high-quality panel data from Germany and Austria, we provide clear evidence for a winner-loser gap in populist attitudes.
More specifically, we demonstrate that voters' populist attitudes strongly decrease when their party is in government. Moreover, the effect appears to be long-lasting as populist attitudes do not completely rebound to pre-government participation levels when a party goes back into opposition. Overall, our study is an important contribution to understanding both the winner-loser gap in satisfaction with democracy as well as research on the causes of populist attitudes.

Robert Huber is a Professor of Political Science Methods at the Department of Political Science at the University of Salzburg. He earned his PhD from ETH Zurich in 2018. Prior to joining the University of Salzburg, Robert served as a lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of Reading. Additionally, he holds the position of co-editor-in-chief at Political Research Exchange and the Populism Seminar. Robert’s primary research focus revolves around examining how globalisation poses new challenges to liberal democracy. Utilising state-of-the-art methods, he investigates areas such as trade policy, climate and environmental politics, and populism. His work has been featured in journals, including the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, and Political Analysis.