WINNERS, LOSERS, AND THEIR VIEW OF DEMOCRACY- A quantitative study of the effect of political knowledge on the winner-loser gap

Sammanfattning

It is commonly agreed that the winner-loser gap, the gap in satisfaction with democracy between winners and losers, is prevalent in most modern democracies. Understanding the gap is essential, as this polarization poses many problems both for voters individually and for states as a whole. Previous research has not yet incorporated political knowledge into the analysis. Political knowledge is proposed to affect the gap in one of two ways: understanding what is at stake, which can help close the gap, or exploring how democracy and political systems function, which can help reduce the gap. Whether political knowledge can explain the occurrence of the winner-loser gap in any of these ways is examined by statistically analyzing electoral survey data from three national election surveys in Sweden. The results indicate that knowledge does not contribute to the gap, either positively or negatively, suggesting that factors other than political knowledge better explain the divided levels of satisfaction between winners and losers, such as affective polarization or the psychological effects of winning and losing.