Social trust and the winner-loser gap

Abstract

The electoral winner-loser gap literature has shown sharp differences between citizens who vote for winning and losing options in key indicators of political support. In this article, we claim that the influence of election results can extend beyond the political domain and reach citizens’ level of social trust. Indeed, elections can reveal to citizens who voted for the winning option that their preferences are aligned with the majority opinion of society, while it signals the opposite to electoral losers. We hypothesize that this contrast will trigger a gap in the level of social trust between winners and losers, and that this gap will be larger among politically engaged voters relative to those more disinterested in political affairs. To contrast our hypotheses, we conducted two online panel surveys with a pre-post electoral design during two recent elections in Chile. Estimates from Two-way Fixed Effects regression models support our main theoretical expectations.