Following a national election, voters whose preferred political party loses tend to experience a noticeable decline in their generalized trust of other people in society. New research published in the journal Electoral Studies suggests that this decline is particularly strong among voters who hold deep negative feelings toward opposing political parties. These findings provide evidence that the competitive nature of modern politics might be weakening the everyday social fabric that helps communities function.
Political scientists often differentiate between political trust and social trust. Political trust refers to how much confidence citizens have in their government institutions, democratic processes, and elected officials. This type of trust is often linked directly to whether a voter’s preferred candidate has the power to implement specific policies. Social trust, on the other hand, is a more generalized, everyday belief that unknown members of society are basically honest and will act according to shared moral rules.
Social trust is often considered a foundational element of a healthy democracy. It encourages civic engagement, supports good governance, and helps communities cooperate to solve collective problems. In the past, experts assumed that a person’s level of social trust was relatively stable and largely immune to the short-term outcomes of political events.
To understand how voting outcomes might shape these everyday attitudes, a team of researchers from McGill University, the University of Toronto, the University of Zurich, and Toronto Metropolitan University collaborated to explore this dynamic in the Canadian electorate. The research team focused on the idea that an election result acts as an informational signal. When an election concludes, the outcome gives voters a rough estimate of how many of their fellow citizens share their political views.
Psychological research suggests that human beings tend to trust people who are similar to themselves. If voters believe that political affiliation reflects a person’s deeper moral character, learning that a majority of the country voted for an opposing party might act as a negative shock. The researchers suspected this realization could lead electoral losers to view the general public as less trustworthy.
They also expected this dynamic to be magnified by affective polarization. Affective polarization is a term used to describe a growing trend where voters feel intense personal dislike toward supporters of rival political parties. When voters strongly dislike opposing factions, they are more likely to view rival voters as immoral or dishonest. The authors noted that Canada, like many other modern democracies, has experienced a notable increase in this type of polarization over the past decade.
To test these ideas, the authors examined survey data collected in Canada between 2004 and 2024. They utilized responses from the Canadian Election Study and the Consortium on Electoral Democracy, which are large academic projects that track public opinion over time. The dataset included information from six national federal elections and eleven subnational provincial elections.
In total, the researchers analyzed information from more than 30,000 respondents, with specific statistical models focusing on samples ranging from 17,570 to 27,813 individuals. The surveys asked participants about their intended vote choice during the campaign period before an election took place. After the election concluded, the same surveys asked participants to answer a standard question measuring their social trust.
This question asked respondents to indicate whether they felt that most people can be trusted or if they felt they needed to be highly cautious when dealing with others. The surveys also asked participants to rate how they felt about each political party on a scale from zero to one hundred. This allowed the research team to calculate each voter’s level of affective polarization by comparing their warm feelings toward their preferred party with their cold feelings toward opposing parties.
The data provides evidence of a consistent gap in social trust between those who supported the winning party and those who supported a losing party. After accounting for demographic factors like age, gender, education, and employment status, the researchers found that electoral losers were about 3.8 percentage points less likely to express trust in others compared to supporters of the winning party. When the analysis was restricted to just the supporters of the winning party and the primary runner up party, this gap widened to roughly six percentage points.
Interestingly, the pre-election expectations of the voters appeared to play a major role in shaping their post-election trust. Voters who supported a losing party but had confidently expected their party to win beforehand experienced the most substantial drop in social trust. Among these optimistic losers, the gap in social trust was nearly ten percentage points when compared to electoral winners.
The scale of the election also seemed to matter in shaping how people viewed their fellow citizens. The researchers found no meaningful gap in social trust following lower order district or provincial elections. They suggest that national elections, which involve a much larger electorate, provide a stronger and more informative signal to voters about the character of the broader society.
The association between losing an election and reporting lower social trust was heavily moderated by a voter’s level of affective polarization. Among voters who reported low levels of animosity toward opposing parties, losing an election was not associated with a notable decline in social trust. For these less polarized individuals, learning that many people voted for a different party did not seem to alter their basic faith in humanity.
For highly polarized voters who strongly disliked opposing parties, the picture looked quite different. Among these voters, the gap in social trust between winners and losers reached roughly ten percentage points. The informational signal that voters derive from elections appears to be interpreted entirely through a lens of their personal dislike for rival partisans.
The authors also found that the trust gap was most apparent in the 2019 and 2021 national elections. According to the study’s data, these specific election years featured the highest levels of affective polarization in Canada during the two decade study period. In earlier elections, when voters expressed less hostility toward rival parties, the researchers found no meaningful gap in social trust between winners and losers.
There are a few important limitations to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. The study’s design relies heavily on observational survey data, which means it cannot definitively prove that losing an election directly alters a person’s trust in others. The observed differences in trust might be influenced by other unmeasured factors, such as changes in the political environment, the specific candidates running, or broader economic conditions during certain election years.
The data also lacks a true control group of voters who were completely unexposed to the election results. Because every citizen experiences the outcome of a national election at the same time, the researchers could only compare winners against losers. They could not compare electoral losers against a neutral baseline of individuals who received no informational signal at all.
Future research could attempt to replicate these findings using different methodologies, such as behavioral games, to see if self-reported distrust translates into actual discriminatory behavior against strangers. Scientists could also expand this research to a larger cross-national sample of elections to see if these patterns hold true outside of the Canadian political system. Exploring potential interventions that reduce partisan animosity might also help researchers understand if softening political tribalism can protect everyday social cohesion.
The study, “Election outcomes and social trust in polarized times,” was authored by Mark Williamson, Amber Hye-Yon Lee, Daniel Rubenson, Iva Srbinovska, David Sumantry, Jonah Davids, Annika Maulucci, and Kristina Kisin.