Fragility of Losers' Consent: Political Institutions and Polarization

Losers' consent, defined as the willingness of electoral losers to accept election outcomes, is central to democratic legitimacy, yet it is fragile. This paper explores how political institutions shape losers' consent and policy polarization by modeling losers' consent as a choice of belief distortion by the electoral loser. We develop a two-period model of electoral competition with partially policy-motivated parties, where the implemented policy is a convex combination of the winner's and loser's platforms. The weight placed on the winner captures the degree of institutional disproportionality. While electoral outcomes provide information about voter preferences, losers may strategically reject this information to preserve anticipatory utility. We show that institutional disproportionality has a non-monotonic effect on electoral denial. As long as losers' consent is interior, greater disproportionality increases denial. However, once institutions become sufficiently proportional, denial discontinuously jumps to full rejection. This denial, in turn, fuels policy polarization. Consequently, although disproportional institutions have a direct moderating effect on platforms, they may indirectly increase polarization by encouraging denial. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for psychological biases when evaluating the design of political institutions.