Project description
Understanding the electoral loser concept
The willingness of election losers to accept results and the authority of winners. It is essential for democratic stability. However, events like the 2021 Capitol riot, when supporters of former US President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol to overturn the presidential election result, reveal just how fragile this principle is. With this in mind, the ERC-funded CONSENT project investigates what drives or undermines this acceptance. It focuses on how citizens react to electoral defeat (whether they accept the results, recognise winners’ legitimacy, or reject being governed). The project will develop a typology of consenting losers and introduce a tool to measure consent across countries and time. Its findings will offer fresh insights into a crucial pillar of democratic resilience.
Objective
Losers’ consent is both a foundation of democracy and one of the big puzzles in political science. In democracies, elections divide citizens between winners and losers, and the expectation is that losers consent to be ruled by the winners. Despite the established notion that losers' consent is fundamental to democracy, recent events like the 2021 Capitol attack in the U.S. and the 2023 Congress attack in Brazil highlight its fragility. Without the losers’ consent, democracies are in danger.
This project addresses three central questions: 1) how can we conceptualize and measure consent; 2) which are the determinants of the losers’ consent and its breakdown, and 3) what are the consequences of the breakdown of consent.
This research will provide a novel and comprehensive conceptualization of consent that encompasses three dimensions: acceptance of election results, recognition of the winners’ legitimate authority, and willingness to be governed by them. In addition, the project will develop a new typology of consenting losers based on their rationalization of electoral defeat and motivations to accept the legitimacy of the government. This typology will be validated using qualitative data.
The project will then develop an original quantitative measure of consent. This measure will be used to track consent in a large set of countries over a long period, and explore the factors that shape it. Special attention will be paid to the role of elites’ narratives and policy proposals in enhancing or eroding losers’ consent. Finally, the project will explore for the first time the impact of the breakdown of consent upon voting, contentious political behavior and social cooperation.
Using a range of methods – focus groups, cross-country surveys, longitudinal analysis, and survey experiments across twenty established democracies – the project will deliver new insights into the dynamics of losers' consent and its importance for democratic resilience and stability.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences political sciences political transitions elections
- social sciences political sciences government systems democracy
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
28006 MADRID
Spain
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