Our next guest of speaker series of Institute for Political Science is Shane P. Singh (University of Georgia) with the presentation entitled:

Do Emotions Drive the Link Between Winning and Satisfaction with Democracy? Leveraging the Super Bowl, the World Cup, and The Lion King

Authors:  Shane P. Singh (University of Georgia), Patrick Fournier (University of Montreal), Jason Roy (Wilfrid Laurier University)

It is well known that people who vote for electoral winners have higher levels of satisfaction with democracy than those who do not. The literature on this link posits a policy mechanism (people become satisfied or dissatisfied because their party will or will not enter government and form policy), and an emotional mechanism (people become satisfied or dissatisfied because winning and losing affects feelings and emotions that then impact satisfaction), but it has not been able to disentangle the two convincingly. To address this, we employ three pre-registered studies. One study is a survey experiment where participants are randomly assigned to a view emotion-inducing excerpts of the animated movie The Lion King before expressing their satisfaction with democracy. The other two studies exploit the outcome of the 2022 Super Bowl and the 2022 World Cup final. In each case, we interview several thousand people in the two regions or countries home to the participant football teams just before and just after each game. These respondents are exogenously separated into winning and losing groups based on the outcome of the game, and this short-term interrupted panel design allows us to estimate the causal effect of experiencing victory on satisfaction with democracy. Further, as the outcome of the games has no bearing on governmental policy, any difference in satisfaction with democracy across groups is attributable to emotions—especially if effects are bigger for respondents with a strong attachment to one of the competing teams. Null effects across the three studies would suggest that prior findings of a winner’s boost in satisfaction with democracy are attributable to policy considerations.