I Study Democracies, and What I've Learned Is This: They Collapse Without Graceful Losers Shaun Bowler - Vox
go to original October 14, 2016

Protests over election results are routine in Mexico (Clasos/CON/Getty)

In every contested election there are winners and losers. While lots of attention, money, and power flows to the winners, it is really the losers who are key to keeping democracy healthy.

More specifically, it is important that the people who lose elections recognize that they lost fair and square — assuming that that is indeed the case — and that they convey that truth to their supporters.

It turns out that learning to be a good loser is not just a life lesson for children playing board games; it is also an important lesson for politicians. More than that, graceful concessions by losing candidates constitute a sort of glue that holds the polity together, providing a cohesion that is lacking in less-well-established democracies.

By talking preemptively about a "rigged system" that may well lead to a "stolen election," Donald Trump is weakening his voters’ faith in elections in a way that could prove extremely dangerous.

Of course, no one likes losing elections: not candidates, and not the people who vote for them. Take the evidence in the chart below, which comes from the American National Election Study’s post-election polling data in 2012.

In the weeks after the election, respondents were asked a series of questions about their faith in politics, politicians, and elections — for instance, "How much say do you have in government?" and "Does it make a different who one votes for?" — and instructed to answer with a number from 1 to 6. The higher the number, the more the respondents think elections are fair, that votes are counted fairly, and the happier they are with democracy. In the chart, the different bars distinguish between those who voted for the winning candidate for president in 2012 (Obama) and those who voted for a losing candidate (typically Romney).



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Related: Mexico Government: Are We Moving Backwards to the 19th Century? (Mexico Voices)

Related: Democracy Has Always Had Its Problems... Just Ask the Greeks (The National)

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