Do emotions drive the link between winning and satisfaction with democracy? Leveraging the Super Bowl, the World Cup, and The Lion King

Abstract Electoral winners are more satisfied with democracy than losers, but there is debate over whether this is due to emotions or policy considerations. In two quasi‐experiments, we exploit the outcomes of major football games, which exogenously separated people into winning and losing groups. As the games' outcomes have no bearing on governmental policy, any detected effects of victory and loss on satisfaction could be attributable to irrelevant emotions. We validate the initial studies with an experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to view emotion‐inducing excerpts from The Lion King . While the manipulations in each study altered participants' emotional states, they had no effect on democratic satisfaction. Because specific election‐induced emotions may be distinct from those experienced by the participants in our studies, we cannot rule out an affective mechanism completely. We conclude that emotions do not indiscriminately drive the winner–loser gap in democratic satisfaction.