Introduction
Might the electoral entry of new radical parties reconcile their voters with democracy? Radical parties have achieved strong electoral success in Western democracies in recent years, increasing their political influence both through formal (institutionalization) and informal (visibility and agenda-setting) means (Manucci, Reference Manucci2025). To cite but a few, in 2017, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was the first radical right party since post-war Germany to enter the Bundestag with 12.6% of the vote share. Two years later, VOX entered the Spanish Congress of Deputies and became the third political force. In cases like the Netherlands, even more than one radical party (PVV and FvD) hold representation in parliament. Yet recent findings suggest that new radical party voters do not become more satisfied with democracy even after sudden electoral gains (Canalejo-Molero, Reference Canalejo-Molero2024; Hooghe and Dassonneville, Reference Hooghe and Dassonneville2018; Rooduijn et al., Reference Rooduijn2016) unless they win (e.g., Cohen et al., Reference Cohen2022). Why their electoral entry fails to boost their voters’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD) remains unclear.
A large body of research indicates that elections should boost SWD, even among election losers, through the expressive benefits of participation and the utility of their (in-group) party results (for a review, see Daoust and Nadeau, Reference Daoust and Nadeau2023). Thus, new party entry should enhance SWD among their voters, as it provides strictly positive utility gains. One potential explanation for why this is not the case for new radical party voters lies in affective polarization. Recent studies have shown that affective polarization moderates SWD after elections, amplifying the winner-loser gap in SWD (Janssen, Reference Janssen2023; Ridge, Reference Ridge2020, Reference Ridge2022). We expand on these findings and argue that new radical party voters’ strong negative affect towards mainstream out-group parties (Harteveld et al., Reference Harteveld2022; Meléndez and Kaltwasser, Reference Meléndez and Rovira Kaltwasser2019; Wagner, Reference Wagner2021) will condition their evaluation of the system after elections, so that if a despised party wins, it will reduce SWD among new radical party voters, counterbalancing the utility of their electoral gains.
We test our argument in the setting of the 2022 French presidential election, which witnessed the electoral entry of the radical right-wing candidate Éric Zemmour. While competing for the first time, Zemmour and his platform Reconquête, obtained an outstanding 7.07% vote share, becoming the fourth most-voted candidate and surpassing the two traditional party candidates. Despite losing the first round against the incumbent Emmanuel Macron and the traditional radical right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen, this scenario rendered Zemmour as a new crucial actor, even in the French majoritarian institutions. First, he supported the candidacy of Marine Le Pen, hence potentially becoming part of her government in the case of her victory. Second, he could gain representation in the follow-up parliamentary elections and become a vital opposition leader in an assembly without a clear majority for the presidential winner. Despite all this political potential, the out-group candidate Emmanuel Macron remained the most likely winner of these elections. Leveraging electoral uncertainty before the second round of the election, this setting provides a unique opportunity to test whether negative affect towards the out-group winner explains changes in SWD among new radical party voters after their entry.
Our analysis combines two studies in a novel mixed-methods design, which relies on representative survey data, an experiment, and a qualitative analysis of open-ended questions. We confirm our hypothesis of the importance of negative out-group affect towards the winner in three ways. With a representative panel survey, our first study establishes that Zemmour voters become relatively less satisfied with democracy and also display the strongest negative affects towards Macron’s party following the election. Following up on this correlational evidence, we designed an original survey experiment conducted between the first and second rounds of the election using an innovative social media recruitment strategy for hard-to-reach populations (Neundorf and Öztürk, Reference Neundorf and Öztürk2021a, Reference Neundorf and Öztürk2021b; Schneider and Harknett, Reference Schneider and Harknett2022). Our second study shows that raising the salience of Macron’s winning potential suppresses any SWD gain and increases negative affects towards Macron’s party among Zemmour voters. Finally, we triangulate our experimental results and disentangle the causal link between out-group negative affects and growing dissatisfaction with democracy through the qualitative analysis of an open-ended question about feelings toward the election results. This analysis shows that Zemmour’s voters never refer to the political benefits associated with their successful entry into the system. Conversely, they more prominently state that elections are rigged, and blame with affectively charged comments the winning out-group party for its control over democratic institutions. Taken together, these three pieces of evidence suggest that polarized radical voters will fail to become more satisfied with democracy despite their entry, as they will be blinded by their hatred towards the out-group winner.
This paper contributes to our understanding of the political dynamics triggered by the irruption of radical parties and bridges the gap between three commonly alleged symptoms of the liberal democracy crisis, namely, democratic dissatisfaction, affective polarization and the rise of radical parties. First, introducing an out-group logic to explain post-electoral changes in SWD provides a parsimonious solution to the puzzling relative SWD decrease among new radical party voters after their electoral entry. Second, the findings suggest a self-reinforcing mechanism leading polarized voters to further polarization and growing dissatisfaction when not winning elections, regardless of their party performance (Cohen et al., Reference Cohen2022; Fahey et al., Reference Fahey2022; Haugsgjerd, Reference Haugsgjerd2019; Juen, Reference Juen2023; Kołczyńska, Reference Kołczyńska2022; Rooduijn and van Slageren, Reference Rooduijn and van Slageren2022). Adding to the debate on the affective polarization and democratic support (Broockman et al., Reference Broockman2023; Graham and Svolik, Reference Graham and Svolik2020; Janssen and Turkenburg, Reference Janssen and Turkenburg2025; Kim and Hall, Reference Kim and Hall2023; Kokkonen and Harteveld, Reference Kokkonen, Harteveld, Torcal and Harteveld2025; Voelkel et al., Reference Voelkel2023), this paper shows that negative partisanship can impede new radical party voters to increase their engagement despite entering democratic institutions. Whereas it has been largely theorized that the political inclusion of marginalized political groups may have a corrective function for representative democracy (Kaltwasser, Reference Kaltwasser2012; Mudde and Kaltwasser, Reference Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser2012), these arguments have neglected the crucial role of out-group negative feelings among radical voters.
Elections, new radical parties and SWD
Since as early as 1978, scholars have theorized the role of elections on democratic support (Ginsberg and Weissberg, Reference Ginsberg and Weissberg1978). Electoral winners were expected to adhere to democratic principles more strongly than losers, who should become more likely to reject them. The empirical evidence, however, has rarely found that elections shift support for regime principles. Instead, there is strong evidence that system evaluations shift with winner-loser status, most commonly measured through SWD.
Following Easton’s (Reference Easton1975) seminal distinction between diffuse support—principled adherence to the regime—and specific support—evaluations of the actors and institutions that compose it—SWD occupies a meso-level position: more diffuse than evaluations of specific actors and institutions such as the government or parliament, but still specific in that it taps into assessments of how democracy works in practice rather than adherence to its principles (Linde and Ekman, Reference Linde and Ekman2003; Norris, Reference Norris2017). Despite debate about its meaning, studies tend to agree on its democratic relevance: while low SWD does not in itself signal a rejection of democracy, it can translate into lower diffuse support under specific conditions (Claassen and Magalhães, Reference Claassen and Magalhães2022; Singh and Mayne, Reference Singh and Mayne2023), making it potentially consequential for democratic stability in the long run.
The literature on SWD and elections has confirmed two major findings. First, winners of elections express a higher degree of satisfaction with the political system than losers (Daoust and Nadeau, Reference Daoust and Nadeau2023). Second, those who participate in the election display a higher level of satisfaction than abstainers (Esaiasson, Reference Esaiasson2011; Kostelka and Blais, Reference Kostelka and Blais2018; Nadeau and Blais, Reference Nadeau and Blais1993). Overall, the main implication is that elections play a legitimizing role, boosting satisfaction across participants, albeit differently across levels of party success, and renewing system legitimacy for the subsequent electoral cycle.
These findings have been interpreted as a result of three interacting mechanisms: utilitarian, emotional, and cognitive. The emotional mechanism predicts that winning provokes an positive emotional reaction that drives positive changes in SWD. The cognitive mechanism proposes that voters adjust their evaluations of the system according to the winner-loser status of their party to maintain cognitive consistency. Finally, the largest weight has been placed on the utilitarian mechanism, which predicts that SWD changes are the result of the expected utility of the outcome in terms of enacted policies and other channels of material advantage tied to results (Anderson et al., Reference Anderson2005: 23–25).
This latter logic is particularly important because it predicts changes in SWD for voter groups according to their electoral results beyond the ‘winners’ (i.e., those entering government). For example, while voters of major coalition partners become more satisfied than those of minor coalition partners, voters of parties in parliament also become more satisfied than those of parties that fail to obtain representation (Blais et al., Reference Blais2017). Even the latter group experiences an increase in SWD compared to abstainers, even if only because of the expressive benefits of voting (Kostelka and Blais, Reference Kostelka and Blais2018). The utilitarian logic is also reflected in patterns of cross-country variation. For example, the winner-loser gap in SWD tends to be larger in majoritarian than in proportional systems, arguably due to the sharper distinction between winners and losers in their access to power (Anderson and Guillory, Reference Anderson and Guillory1997; Martini and Quaranta, Reference Martini and Quaranta2019).
Based on this evidence, we should expect new party voters to experience a boost in SWD after their electoral entry. We define electoral entry as the transition from a negligible or non-existent vote share (i.e., when the party is new) to a result large enough to grant access to political resources and influence, both by formal and informal means. This is distinct from winning in the traditional sense of government formation. Such a result falls short of government entry and its associated benefits, but it still generates strictly positive utility gains through increased visibility, legitimization, media attention, agenda-setting capacity, and in some cases material resources (such as public campaign financing). The utilitarian mechanism should therefore apply, and new party voters should, at the very least, experience a larger increase in SWD than abstainers. These utilities may also be accompanied by subjective feelings of winning among some voters (Plescia, Reference Plescia2019; Stiers et al., Reference Stiers2018), reinforcing any positive change in SWD through emotional and cognitive processes as well.
The expectation of an electoral entry boost sits in tension with the evidence on radical party voters. Hooghe and Dassonneville (Reference Hooghe and Dassonneville2018) show that radical (protest) voters in Belgium display a relative decline in satisfaction (measured as lower trust for political institutions) after elections. Rooduijn et al. (Reference Rooduijn2016) find a similar pattern among populist party voters in the Netherlands. In addition, Canalejo-Molero (Reference Canalejo-Molero2024) uses post-electoral survey data from more than 70 democratic elections worldwide to show that obtaining parliamentary representation is associated with a decrease in SWD among radical party voters. Although none of these studies provides definitive evidence on the mechanisms, they challenge the generalizability of the utilitarian argument, leaving unclear why radical party voters do not experience a boost in SWD following electoral gains.
The in-group/out-group framework of changes in SWD after elections
The literature has suggested several mechanisms to explain the puzzling relative decrease in SWD among radical voters. For example, Hooghe and Dassonneville (Reference Hooghe and Dassonneville2018) suggest a cognitive mechanism, while Rooduijn et al. (Reference Rooduijn2016) suggest an anti-elitist rhetoric explanation. However, none of these hypotheses is supported by accompanying evidence. In contrast, Canalejo-Molero (Reference Canalejo-Molero2024) shows that only radical party voters with strong pre-existing anti-establishment attitudes become more dissatisfied after elections. This evidence indicates that only voters who already disliked mainstream parties are negatively affected by election results, suggesting that these voters’ focus on the victory of a disliked party may drive the decrease in SWD.
The notion that SWD is affected not only by the in-group results’ evaluations but also the out-group party outcomes resonates with recent evidence of the moderating effect of affective polarization on changes in SWD after elections. First, Ridge (Reference Ridge2020, Reference Ridge2022) uses rich cross-sectional data to show that voters with negative affects towards the winner display lower SWD than regular losers. Second, Janssen (Reference Janssen2023) uses panel data and growth models to identify a decrease in SWD among losers of the 2015 UK election driven by affectively polarized voters. We expand on these findings, and refine the winner-loser gap theory by introducing an out-group logic in complement to the in-group lens. We argue that the out-group party win can suppress or counteract the positive impact of the new (in-group) party results on SWD, preventing the expected boost in democratic satisfaction.
Therefore, we refine the existing theoretical framework on post-elections changes in SWD that focus on an in-group logic (Anderson et al., Reference Anderson2005; Blais et al., Reference Blais2017) by incorporating the role of party identity and growing affective polarization (Iyengar et al., Reference Iyengar2012; Reiljan, Reference Reiljan2020; Wagner, Reference Wagner2021). Our argument posits that post-electoral changes in SWD are a function of two, and not one factor. The first established factor is the in-group party results, which can alter SWD through three interrelated mechanisms: utility, emotions, and cognitive updating. All three predict the same relationship, with electoral participation and better electoral outcomes correlating positively with SWD. The second is an out-group factor that varies by the degree of negative affects towards the winner and negatively impacts SWD.
For clarity, let us assume a simple scenario with two differentiated blocks and a dichotomous winner-loser status so that when group A is the winner, group B is the loser and vice versa. In this scenario, if the degree of affective polarization between the blocks is low, the out-group factor would be close to zero, and changes in SWD would depend exclusively on the in-group outcomes. Hence, winners would become more satisfied than losers after elections, and losers would still become more satisfied than abstainers. However, if the degree of affective polarization is high, changes in SWD among losers would be negatively affected by the salience of the out-group block win, so that the net change can be negative despite relative electoral success. This logic implies a threshold parameter that, when reached, shifts the net change in SWD from positive to negative. Beyond negative affects and in-group results, other contextual factors, such as the electoral system (Anderson and Guillory, Reference Anderson and Guillory1997; Martini and Quaranta, Reference Martini and Quaranta2019), may condition it. Nonetheless, wherever that threshold lies, negative affects will always theoretically dominate in-group results in explaining SWD change once it is crossed.
The out-group negative effect may operate through the same three channels as the in-group positive effect. First, following the emotional logic, negative affect towards the election winner can trigger negative emotions (fear, anger, disgust) that shape system evaluations negatively. Second, negative affects are also rooted in policy disagreement (Dias and Lelkes, Reference Dias and Lelkes2022; Orr et al., Reference Orr2023), so that fears about the winning party’s behaviour in power may shape system evaluations indirectly through utility calculations. Third, cognitive dissonance avoidance may lead voters who strongly disliked the winner to rationalize the outcome as a result of a flawed system rather than accept a defeat that conflicts with their prior beliefs, an interpretation that can translate into perceptions of procedural unfairness and system delegitimation. The three mechanisms may operate together, and we therefore lack priors to expect any one of them to dominate.
This argument is consistent with the psychology of inter-group relations. An out-group win can constitute an identity threat, which social identity theory predicts should trigger defensive affective reactions (Tajfel and Turner, Reference Tajfel and Turner2004). Negativity bias may amplify these reactions, making the out-group win dominate evaluations even when the in-group simultaneously achieves electoral gains (Rozin and Royzman, Reference Rozin and Royzman2001; Tversky and Kahneman, Reference Tversky and Kahneman1974). Finally, motivated reasoning leads voters to process electoral outcomes selectively in ways consistent with their prior affective dispositions (Lodge and Taber, Reference Lodge and Taber2013), reinforcing the mechanisms discussed above.
Regardless of the specific mechanism, our key prediction is that sufficiently strong negative affect towards the out-group winner will outweigh the utility boost from in-group electoral results. Since radical party voters are among the most affectively polarized (Harteveld et al., Reference Harteveld2022; Meléndez and Kaltwasser, Reference Meléndez and Rovira Kaltwasser2019; Reiljan, Reference Reiljan2020; Wagner, Reference Wagner2021), we argue that they will be particularly prone to experiencing a relative SWD decrease after an out-group win.
While our argument is not theoretically confined to new radical parties, we focus on them for one crucial reason. The utility associated with a given electoral outcome is contingent on the party’s electoral history and expectations, which leaves room for ambiguity regarding the in-group positive effect. In contrast, a new party’s electoral entry entails strictly positive utility gains through increased political influence by formal (institutionalization) and informal (public visibility, agenda-setting, legitimization) means. If our argument is correct, a new radical party’s electoral entry should always boost SWD unless negative affect towards the out-group winner is sufficiently strong, as we argue is the case for radical party voters.
We derive two sets of testable hypotheses. Focusing on a plausible new radical party scenario, we can leverage a electoral uncertainty to increase the salience of similarly likely electoral outcomes. In this way, we can introduce variation in the perceived success of the in-group and its associated utility, while minimizing the variation in the perceived success of the out-group and vice versa. The first set of hypotheses tests the robustness of the utilitarian in-group logic for new radical party voters. In this setting, in-group candidates’ benefit of becoming a government coalition partner or playing a minor but potentially crucial role in parliament is emphasized. Both potential outcomes should increase the utility of the election results according to the existing literature. By contrast, null findings would suggest the need of theory refinement when it comes to new radical parties. The following hypothesesFootnote 1 capture these expectations:
Hypothesis 1a: Increasing the salience of the in-group party’s representation potential will be associated with a positive change in SWD.
Hypothesis 1b: Increasing the salience of the in-group party’s coalition-making potential will be associated with a positive change in SWD.
In addition, we test all the established downstream expectations of the utilitarian mechanism by comparing the relative effect of each outcome. The utilitarian logic implies that positive changes in SWD should be larger the higher the utility of the in-group electoral results. Being in government, even as a minor coalition partner, should allow a larger influence on policy decisions than an opposition role in parliament. Therefore, the SWD increase associated with the coalition-making potential should be higher:
Hypothesis 2: Increasing the salience of the in-group party’s coalition-making potential will be associated with a larger positive change in SWD than increasing the salience of the in-group party’s representation potential.
The second set of hypotheses focuses on testing our theory refinement proposal: the prevalence of an affective out-group logic for new radical voters. In our setting, the out-group candidate is a potential election winner. Given that the in-group candidate supporters are affectively polarized, increasing the salience of its likely win should negatively affect SWD. The following hypothesis captures this expectation:
Hypothesis 3: Increasing the salience of the out-group party’s winning potential will be associated with a negative change in SWD.
Furthermore, we can provide evidence of the underlying mechanism. According to our theory, the out-group candidate’s win should decrease SWD by provoking a negative affective response among the supporters of the in-group losing candidate. Although we cannot test this mechanism directly, we can provide indirect evidence by testing some of its implications. Specifically, we can test whether increasing the salience of the out-group party win elicits more explicit negative feelings towards it:
Hypothesis 4: Increasing the salience of the out-group party’s winning potential will be associated with stronger negative feelings towards the out-group party.
A two-studies, mixed-methods design: the 2022 French presidential election and the case of Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête
We test our expectations in two studies using a mixed methods approach that builds on the unique contextual setting of the 2022 French presidential elections. We focus on supporters of the new radical right party Reconquête, led by Éric Zemmour. This specific case and the study of Reconquête voters are particularly suited to test our in-group/out-group expectations in a new radical party electoral entry scenario. Reconquête made an electoral breakthrough (1) but lost the presidential elections (2) and is supported by an affectively polarized group of voters, with strong negative out-group affects directed to the mainstream party winner La République en Marche (3).
Our study takes place in the French semi-presidential and majoritarian system during the 2022 presidential (April) and legislative (June) elections.Footnote 2 Since 2002 and before the most recent national Assembly dissolution in June 2024, presidential and parliamentary elections were held sequentially and close to each other every five years following a two-round, first-past-the-post system. The President is directly appointed via direct suffrage from voters according to a majority rule, while the ‘second’ head of the executive, the Prime Minister, as well as the government, are appointed by the President, but subjected to the Assembly’s confidence vote. In other words, in the case of an opposition majority in the Assembly, a ‘cohabitation’ executive emerges where the opposition Prime Minister and National Assembly hold most governing powers.
Given these features, Éric Zemmour’s electoral success in presidential elections made him a potentially crucial political player despite losing the first round, which should boost his voters’ utilitarian considerations. Only four months after announcing his candidacy, his party successfully entered the French electoral system by obtaining about 7% of the vote share in the first round of the French presidential elections. Despite his short campaign and the absence of the backing of a long-standing organization, this candidate outperformed the established Socialist Party and Les Républicains. With Marine Le Pen’s first-round victory, together with the increasing fragmentation of the French political space, Zemmour’s party, therefore, had the potential to become a key partner in government or the Assembly despite his electoral loss. Hence, while the French majoritarian system sharpens the winner-loser distinction, the doors to becoming a governing partner were still open for Zemmour’s Reconquête after the first round of the elections.
In addition, Éric Zemmour’s supporters make a particularly well-suited case to explore the affective out-group hypotheses. As Figure 1 shows, Zemmour supporters in our sampleFootnote 3 display strong ‘[.] positive in-group affect and negative out-group affect towards parties’ (Wagner, Reference Wagner2021, 1), corresponding to the textbook definition of affective polarization. Following patterns of affective polarization in multi-party systems, these strong negative affects are directed not only towards the other side of the political spectrum (Mélenchon’s party: La France Insoumise—LFI) but mainly towards the out-group mainstream party, La République en Marche (LREM), and its leader, Emmanuel Macron. Given this intense out-group hatred towards the winner, Zemmour’s supporters should be particularly sensitive to the increased salience of Macron’s victory.
Zemmour voters like-dislike scales for each party.
To test our theoretical expectations, we combine two studies and a mixed-methods approach with an observational and representative panel study, an experiment, and a qualitative analysis of open-ended responses to triangulate our findings. Figure 2 presents a timeline with the main periods of data collection and key events that justify this unique design. First, we establish the relative dissatisfaction with democracy of new radical party voters following elections, and the plausibility of our out-group mechanism with observational data in a representative sample. Study 1 enables us to do so, building on the French Electoral Study (FES), a publicly available representative panel survey with pre/post presidential elections waves.
Timeline of studies and significant electoral events.
Second, having established the drawbacks of the utilitarian in-group logic and plausibility of our theoretical addition with observational evidence, study 2 formally tests our causal expectations. We rely on an experiment embedded in an original panel survey with a convenience sample of Facebook users that purposefully oversamples Zemmour supporters. With the first wave conducted right before the first round of the presidential elections and the second wave between the first and second rounds, our experiment leverages the uncertainty of the inter-round period by manipulating the salience of the utilitarian in-group benefits against the out-group potential within the second wave.
Third, to triangulate that the out-group logic prevails in the eyes of new radical right voters, but also understand whether and how out-group mechanisms unfold, and their link to dissatisfaction with democracy, study 2 includes a qualitative analysis of open-ended answers. These rich, qualitative, and unprompted reactions to the election results enable us go beyond quantitative indicators and explore the meaning attached to (dis)satisfaction with democracy.
Altogether, this unique mixed-methods design builds on each method’s strengths and addresses their respective limitations to provide a comprehensive test of our novel theoretical framework.
Study 1—elections, SWD change and party affects
Radical party voters were found to become less satisfied after electoral gains and entering democratic institutions (Canalejo-Molero, Reference Canalejo-Molero2024; Hooghe and Dassonneville, Reference Hooghe and Dassonneville2018; Rooduijn et al., Reference Rooduijn2016). In this study, we first confirm this pattern for the French case, and the limitations of the established winner-loser gap model. Our argument posits that radical party voters focus not only on the in-group utilitarian benefits of their electoral results but also on the victory of a disliked out-group. Consequently, we expect Zemmour voters to dislike more the winning party and become less satisfied with democracy compared to other voters, despite their electoral entry.
We test these expectations using the French Election Study (FES)—2022 panel (Persico et al., Reference Persico2022).Footnote 4 This dataset provides a representative sample of French citizens interviewed online in five waves from November 2021, when Éric Zemmour was already officially a candidate for the elections, to June 2022, following the legislative elections. We focus on the two closest waves before and after the two rounds of the presidential election, in February 2022 and May 2022, and assess the change of SWD across different groups of voters.
We use two indicators to measure our first dependent variable: SWD change. The question ‘According to you, the French democracy works… [Very well-Not well at all]’ was used as the pre-election indicator, and ‘In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the working of the French democracy? [Very-Not at all]’ as the post-election indicator. Although the wording of the two questions differs slightly, they tap into the same concept of satisfaction with the working of democracy, they correlate highly (corr = 0.72), and both provide an ordered four-category scale, alleviating potential concerns regarding their comparability. We compute the change between pre-post indicators as our dependent variable. To test our expectations regarding the existence of an out-group affective mechanism, our second dependent variable is the feeling towards the winning party, measured by a feeling thermometer towards Emmanuel Macron’s party ranging from 0 to 10 in the post-presidential election wave.
Our main independent variable is vote choice, with each of the first four party candidates (Macron, Le Pen, Mélenchon, Zemmour) in the first round, abstainers, and blank/null voters as a separate category. We group voters of other parties and use it as the reference category. We model alternatively SWD change or feelings towards Macron’s party against vote choice, controlling for socio-demographic variables (gender, age, education, income and employment status), left-right self-placement, and political interest. We also control for pre-election SWD levels to cancel out potential floor/ceiling effects.Footnote 5
Figure 3 displays the results. Consistent with our expectations, Zemmour voters become less satisfied with democracy compared to other candidate voters other than the first four contenders. This relatively lower SWD change occurs despite their party leader winning 7% of the presidential election vote and with the prospects of entering the National Assembly remaining open. Compared to the reference group, SWD is lower by 0.11 points on the SWD change scale that we normalized to run from −1 to 1. Interestingly, there are no discernible differences in SWD change between abstainers and voters of other parties, so Zemmour supporters also experience a relative decline compared to abstainers. Marine Le Pen voters, who faced a sharp defeat in the second round of elections, also shows lower satisfaction compared to other voters, although the point estimate suggests a smaller change than Zemmour voters. Finally, supporters of Macron became more satisfied with democracy, as the winner-loser gap literature would predict.
Vote choice effect on SWD (left) and feelings towards LREM (right) coefficient plot.
Our expectations regarding negative affects towards the winner are equally confirmed. As the right-hand side of the figure displays, Zemmour voters seem to dislike the LREM party the most after the presidential elections, by about a statistically significant 2-point difference on a 10-point scale compared to the reference group of other party voters. It is worth noting that the first two losers of elections (Le Pen and Mélenchon voters) do not significantly differ from abstainers or other voters in that regard. Finally, and intuitively, Macron voters like their candidate the most following his election win.
This observational evidence aligns with our expectations that Zemmour voters become relatively less satisfied with democracy following a defeat despite their electoral entry and associated political benefits. In addition, we show that these radical voters differ significantly from other groups regarding the intensity of their negative out-group affects against the winner. These results provide preliminary evidence that an out-group affective mechanism may be at play, explaining lower SWD among radical voters.
While the representative nature of this survey data supports the plausibility of our theoretical addition and the generalizability of our findings, this study does not allow for the test of our causal argument relative to the election activation of out-group negative affects driving growing dissatisfaction with democracy. Moreover, this panel data poses a hard test for the in-group/utilitarian mechanism, especially in the French majoritarian and presidential system. As the second wave of our panel follows the second round of the presidential election and Marine Le Pen’s defeat, Zemmour voters may be less likely to perceive the utilitarian benefits of the system, as one of the channels to become a coalition partner in the French system (via the appointment by Marine Le Pen as president) vanished. To address these drawbacks, we experimentally manipulate the salience of the in-group/out-group success among Zemmour voters between the two rounds of the presidential election in our second study.
Study 2—mixed-methods evidence of the out-group hatred mechanism
In our second study, we pre-registered a vignette experiment that manipulates the frame presenting the first round of the election outcomes.Footnote 6 This frame aims to vary the salience of the in-group (new radical right party candidate: Zemmour) or the out-group (mainstream party potential winner: Macron) perceived success following the first round of the elections. As a reminder of our hypotheses, we expect that increasing the salience of the in-group party success should enhance SWD (H1), especially when focusing on the executive compared to the legislative power (H2). However, we also expect that increasing the salience of the out-group party win will decrease SWD (H3) by increasing negative feelings towards the winner (H4). We complement this experimental analysis with a qualitative analysis of an open-ended question to triangulate our findings and explore the mechanisms between out-group affect and dissatisfaction with democracy.
Recruiting Éric Zemmour’s supporters through the Facebook Advertisement System (FAM)
Our study required a convenience sample of potential Zemmour voters. However, this group falls within the category of a hard-to-reach population since individual ideological preferences are not typically observable and radical ideological views are more likely to be hidden because of social norms (Bursztyn et al., Reference Bursztyn2020; Valentim, Reference Valentim2021). Henceforth, we followed recruitment strategies from sociological and medical research (Guillory et al., Reference Guillory2018; Pötzschke and Weiß, Reference Pötzschke and Weiß2021), and relied on the Facebook Advertisement Management (FAM) system to infer radical right preferences from publicly available observable characteristics on Meta networks such as Facebook and Instagram.
We followed two steps. First, we designed ads to appeal to Zemmour voters using keywords and images appealing to the nationalist values corresponding to his political platformFootnote 7 (Hooghe et al., Reference Hooghe2002; Kriesi et al., Reference Kriesi2008; Mudde, Reference Mudde2007). Figure 4 displays an example of one of our sample ads. The exact content of the message and picture varied to target different socio-demographic groups and increase the variability of our sample. Second, we used the Meta targeting tool to select groups of users based on public users’ preferences for right-leaning media outlets. Our strategy was successful, and our sample over-represents radical right supporters (52%) compared to the French population, including 34% of prospective Zemmour voters, while mirroring representative samples on gender and age.Footnote 8
Facebook Ad Example.
Manipulating the in-group/out-group success: the experimental design
Our experiment was embedded in the second wave of an online panel survey. The first wave, conducted prior to the presidential elections, collected information on respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics, baseline attitudes towards democracy and institutions, partisan identification, affective polarization, and vote intention. Voluntary participants were then re-contacted via email to participate in the second wave, which was fielded immediately after the first round of the presidential election.Footnote 9
Using the vote intention indicator, we implemented block randomization across three groups of party supporters: Zemmour, Le Pen, and other parties. Our primary focus is on Block I (Zemmour supporters), while the other two blocks serve as placebo groupsFootnote 10 and to explore scope conditions of our argument. Within each block, respondents were randomly assigned to receive either a control vignette or one of four treatment vignettes.
All vignettes presented a short text describing the electoral ranking of the top four candidates and identifying the two winners of the first round: Macron and Le Pen. The control condition displayed only this descriptive information, while the four treatment conditions included an additional statement.
The first two treatment conditions (T1a, T1b) included a statement emphasizing the prospective success of the in-group candidate (Zemmour) and the utilitarian benefits of his entry. While both vignettes positively emphasized his result, the first focused on the government coalition potential (T1a). In contrast, the other emphasized the representation potential in the Assembly following the upcoming legislative elections (T1b). The following treatment condition (T2) tests our out-group hypothesis. It underlines that the out-group candidate (Macron) will likely win the second round of the elections. Finally, we added a placebo condition to rule out potential alternative explanations.
Drawing upon the literature on social norms and the radical right (Bischof and Wagner, Reference Bischof and Wagner2019; Bursztyn et al., Reference Bursztyn2020; Valentim, Reference Valentim2021), the placebo condition emphasizes the mainstream censorship of the new radical right candidate, with the underlying expectation that elections might decrease SWD among radical right voters because they increase the salience of the social norm against them. Importantly, this condition indirectly taps into a scenario of exclusion analogous to a cordon sanitaire, allowing us to rule out whether frustration with such exclusion better explains negative changes in SWD. Table 1 displays the specific text in the control condition, followed by the statements presented for each treatment group.Footnote 11
Description of the vignettes by treatment condition (Zemmour Block)
The vignette was followed by the measure of our two dependent variables: change in SWD and party affects.Footnote 12 Change in SWD measures the difference between the post-treatment score and the first wave response to the question ‘On the whole, how satisfied are you with the way democracy works in France?’, ranging from 0 to 10 (change range = −10 to 10). Our second dependent variable measures changes in out-group affects. Given that our expectation regarding the effect of electoral outcomes on party affects concerns the in-group-loser and out-group-winner division and not the overall changes in party affects within a multi-party system (Reiljan, Reference Reiljan2020; Wagner, Reference Wagner2021), our dependent variable is the change on a 10-point (−5 to 5) like-dislike feeling thermometer for the mainstream out-group party (‘LREM’ and its presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron).Footnote 13 A diagram of the experimental design is displayed in Figure 5.
Experimental design diagram.
Figure 5. Long description
A flowchart illustrating the experimental design for studying the impact of new radical parties on voter satisfaction with democracy. The flowchart starts with Vote Intention Wave 1, which branches into three categories: Zemmour, Le Pen, and Other. Each category leads to a corresponding block: Block I for Zemmour, Block II for Le Pen, and Block III for Other. These blocks converge into an Experiment Wave 2. The experiment then branches into five different conditions: Control, T1a In-group Government, T1b In-group Parliament, T2 Out-group Government, and Placebo Social Norm, each representing 20 percent of the experiment.
Experimental results and discussion
We test our hypotheses with two main models. The first model tests hypotheses 1, 2, and 3 by regressing the change in SWD on a categorical treatment variable. The second model tests hypothesis 4 by regressing the change in feelings towards Macron’s party, LREM, on the treatment. We use OLS regression to estimate the average treatment effect (ATE), with the control group’s average change serving as the baseline. Figure 6 plots the coefficients and confidence intervals associated with each treatment condition. The left-hand side figure shows the ATE on the change in SWD, while the right-hand side figure shows the ATE on the change in feelings towards LREM.
ATE on change in SWD (left) and in feelings towards LREM (right).
The left-side of Figure 6 indicates that none of the utilitarian hypotheses (H1a, H1b, and H2) receives any empirical support. Respondents primed with either the potential of Zemmour to be part of the government or to play a decisive role in parliament do not report statistically significant differences in SWD change. In contrast, the results lend support to the negative out-group hypothesis (H3). The same plot shows that increasing the salience of Macron’s potential win negatively affects SWD change, with an effect close to −1.5 points compared to the control condition. This estimate is statistically significant at a 95% confidence level in our baseline specification, and at a 90% confidence level consistently across a wide range of alternative specifications.Footnote 14 Furthermore, this is a substantive effect, comparable in size to the winner-loser gap in SWD in low-quality democracies (Nadeau et al., Reference Nadeau2021).
To further provide a substantive interpretation of these findings, we examine descriptive trajectories in Appendix D11. There, we see a net average increase in SWD after the first wave, consistent with the legitimizing role of elections. At the same time, and consistent with our puzzle, this change is by far the smallest among Zemmour supporters compared to other voter groups. Most importantly, any positive change disappears for those in the out-group win condition, suppressing a potential positive change of almost 1 point out of 10 in SWD, for voters already deeply dissatisfied with democracy.Footnote 15
The right side of Figure 6 provides supportive evidence for our hypothesized out-group negative affect mechanism (H4). We find that priming Zemmour’s voters with Macron’s potential win also has an effect of almost −0.5 points on feelings towards Macron’s party. While not statistically significant at conventional statistical thresholds in this model specification, the estimate remains consistent across models and is statistically significant at a 90% confidence level when controlling for socio-demographic variablesFootnote 16 and adding robust standard errors.
We test the robustness of our findings and its resistance to alternative explanations in several ways. One possibility is that our treatments were not sufficiently strong. We assess this with additional evidence: our manipulation checks show that both in-group treatments increase the perception of Zemmour as a winner, making it unlikely that they did not work (Appendix D3). Of course, if many Zemmour voters consider their candidate a winner, this makes the null effect of our in-group utilitarian treatments even more striking. On top of the political utility of electoral entry, subjective winner perceptions may trigger positive emotional and cognitive responses that boost SWD (Plescia, Reference Plescia2019; Stiers et al., Reference Stiers2018). In Appendix D10, we show that a non-negligible share of Zemmour voters indeed perceive him as a winner. However, we also show that Macron is considered a winner even more frequently (64%), and much more often a clear than a ‘rather a’ winner (31% vs. 12%),Footnote 17 which reconciles our findings and provides even stronger support for our theoretical framework.
Another possibility is that the effect is driven by the disappointed (high) electoral expectations of Zemmour voters. Still, we find that the effect of a potential Macron win also holds when controlling for the perceived likelihood of Zemmour winning the second round. In fact, this variable has a non-significant coefficient with a positive sign, suggesting that voters who believed Zemmour could win the election are not more dissatisfied with democracy after the first round results. Therefore, we can rule out concerns that electoral expectations are driving the effect.Footnote 18
Finally, and importantly, we acknowledge that our small sample size results in noisy estimates (n = 123) which may be biased (see Loken and Gelman, Reference Loken and Gelman2017). In our case, it is unlikely that underpowering alone explains our results because it would rarely systematically push all coefficients in the opposite direction from expectations. Yet, to address concerns about low statistical power, we triangulate our findings using an out-of-sample replication based on our pilot study (n = 130). The treatment in the pilot was identical, the only difference being that respondents completed the survey prior to the first round of elections and were shown hypothetical first-round results mirroring current polling instead of actual results. Even in this hypothetical scenario, priming respondents about Macron’s likely second-round victory significantly reduced SWD by 1.2 scale points,Footnote 19 while the in-group treatments had no discernible effects. Observing similar effects in both direction and magnitude across two independent but similarly sized samples strengthens our confidence that the main results are not due to chance and that priming Zemmour voters with Macron’s potential victory reduces satisfaction with democracy.
Overall, these results lend support to our theoretical framework, introducing an affective-driven out-group mechanism explaining the absence of the expected boost in SWD among radical party voters. The victory of a party towards which they hold strong negative feelings seems to suppress the positive shift in satisfaction levels that would otherwise follow their party’s electoral entry, and further reinforces their negative feelings towards it.
Three more pieces of evidence reinforce our confidence in our interpretation of the findings and help to set out the scope conditions of the argument. First, the placebo condition has no significant effect on change in SWD or feelings towards LREM. Although the coefficients associated with this condition are always negative, the potential negative effect of displaying a normative reaction against Reconquête’s platform is not strong enough to significantly reduce SWD. This evidence suggests that the cause of the seemingly negative effect of elections on democratic satisfaction is the mainstream win itself, and not frustration with their institutional exclusion, as could derive from a cordon sanitaire.
Second, the replication of the experiment on Le Pen’s voters suggests that the negative effect of a potential out-group win is not strong enough to suppress the positive shift in SWD among potential radical party winners. In the inter-round period, RN was still a plausible winner, so despite its voters displaying strong negative affect towards Macron and LREM, they had not yet realized the final utilities of their electoral result, and any negative affect triggered by the out-group was likely counterbalanced by positive expectations. This suggests that ‘not winning’ is a clear scope condition of our argument.
Third, the replication of the experiment on the ‘others’ group provides an even stronger case for the prevalence of the affective out-group logic among polarized voters, even beyond radical parties. This heterogeneous block shares a common out-group hatred for Zemmour’s party and, for them, being primed with Macron’s victory does not affect their SWD, while Zemmour’s potential victory increases both system dissatisfaction and negative affect towards Zemmour. This result is particularly important for delineating our scope conditions, since this group is mainly composed of LFI voters—another radical party, this time left-wing. As shown in Appendix F2 using the FES data, these supporters primarily direct negative affect towards Reconquête and RN, so that an additional scope condition may be a most-disliked rather than a merely disliked party winner. So, LFI voters may also experience an SWD decrease when their most-disliked party, RN, wins.Footnote 20
Disentangling utility and affect qualitatively: methodological approach
To further explore the mechanisms at play and to triangulate our findings, we conducted a qualitative analysis using respondents’ answers to an open-ended question. At the end of the survey, respondents were asked: ‘Finally, in one or two sentences and using your own words, could you describe your feelings regarding the results of these elections?’.
Triangulating our findings qualitatively is particularly well-suited for identifying mechanisms. First, using an open-ended question with a broad scope of respondents’ ‘feelings’ enables strengthening the validity of the results. With such an unprompted answer, respondents are able to express anything they consider most salient and relevant to them, including elements not related to our theoretical expectations. In other words, if the out-group affective mechanism, as opposed to alternatives, is prevalent in these answers, this would support our theorized out-group logic. Second, our experiment is limited by the quantitative operationalization of the affective mechanism and democratic satisfaction. Qualitative answers enable us to tap into the broader expression of negative affects and out-group hatred, beyond what a likert scale allows us. Similarly, we can obtain richer understanding on the meanings of dissatisfation with democracy in citizens’ own words. Third, and unlike the experimental data where both affects and SWD are alternative dependent variables, open-ended answers allows us to explore whether and how respondents connects both phenomena. Hence it allows us to assess the alignment of these links with our theorized causal channel between the out-group logic and SWD.
Our qualitative analytical approach builds upon the following three expectations. First, if an affective out-group logic holds, we would expect to find answers mentioning the out-group party and its leader (Macron and La République en Marche) charged with negative affects, rather than positive evaluations of the in-group party (Zemmour’s Reconquête) and references to his performance as expected by the utilitarian logic. Second, if Zemmour voters fail to become more satisfied with democracy because of this affective mechanism, we would expect that they would connect some of these out-group negative affects with negative evaluations of the democratic system. Third, we expect these two phenomenon to be more prevalent among our Zemmour voters compared to Marine Le Pen and Other candidates’ voters.
We relied on a systematic qualitative coding approach to explore in a systematic way whether these open answers are in line with these expectations. One of the researchers systematically coded all 370 open survey answers using three predefined categories. A ‘feeling’ code (1) is used to describe the main feeling(s) expressed by respondents in their answers. This code included pre-defined subcategories of feelings and emotions associated with out-group negative affects according to the literature, such as ‘anger’, ‘disgust-loathing’, and ‘fear-anxiety’ (Iyengar et al., Reference Iyengar2012; Mason, Reference Mason2018; Reiljan, Reference Reiljan2020; Renström and Bäck, Reference Renström and Bäck2025). A ‘group’ code (2), within which any party reference and its associated evaluation or affects (positive or negative) tone was included. Finally, we included a ‘democracy evaluation’ code (3), gathering all answers mentioning the working of democracy. This deductive codebook jointly agreed was complemented iteratively in an abductive approach during the coding process to allow alternative inductively-based mechanisms to emerge from the qualitative data. Practically speaking, other feelings (such as ‘fatalism’ or ‘hope’) and non-party groups (in particular ‘the media’, ‘French people’, or ‘the extremes’) mentioned by respondents were integrated into the codebook as subcategories. A final coding round was then executed with the resulting full version of the codebook, with a second researcher coding a subset of responses for reliability.Footnote 21 The following section describes our findings.
Qualitative triangulation of the out-group affective mechanism: results and discussion
Our experimental findings showed that only emphasizing the out-group party victory led to shifts in SWD and stronger negative feelings towards the mainstream party leader. Overall, the qualitative evidence provides further support for these findings.
The most striking evidence speaking once more against an in-group utilitarian mechanism is the absence of any satisfaction regarding these elections and the overwhelmingly negative feelings expressed by Zemmour voters. The most commonly expressed feelings (present in about a third of Zemmour supporters’ answers) are a form of disappointment, as well as a form of fatalism, given that the upcoming second round of these elections reproduced the outcome of the 2017 presidential elections. When looking at the sources of these feelings among these voters, the most often cited source of this negative feeling is Macron’s victory, as this series of answers illustratesFootnote 22 :
Q1: ‘A great frustration to find a duel Macron Le Pen in the second round. The absence of a sanction vote against Macron.’
Q2: ‘Disappointed not to see Reconquête in the 2nd round and to see Macron qualified.’
Q3: ‘Deeply disappointed that more than 25% of the voters voted for Macron after 5 terrible years for France.’
By contrast, over the 123 open answers, none mentions Zemmour’s results as an electoral success, a promising first step, or a form of recognition within the system. In addition, none but one answer mentions the 1st round victory of Marine Le Pen and her party as a promising result for Reconquête’s weight in the political system. While some may mention Zemmour and his party in a positive light when mentioning his ideas or his campaign, the lack of utility derived from his electoral performance is particularly visible through the absence of ‘hope’ or ‘satisfaction’ regarding the results. This is especially striking compared to Le Pen supporters’ answers, winners of the first round, which also refer to very negative feelings but include more hopeful and satisfied comments than Zemmour voters.
Beyond being almost exclusively negative, some specific feelings and evaluations of these elections tap more directly into the concept of out-group hatred as identified by the literature (Mason, Reference Mason2018; Renström and Bäck, Reference Renström and Bäck2025). For instance, many respondents also express feelings of disgust, anger, or anxiety regarding the out-group party leader and his victory, as the following excerpts show:
Q4: ‘I am disgusted that Macron is in the second round of the presidential election after all the dirty deals he has done.’
Q5: ‘Disappointing, Macron is in the second round, 9 million French people vote for this sinister character. They should be made to pay for it, and make them pay dearly.’
Q6: ‘Scary, after 5 years of violence and lies to a level like never known so many people vote for Macron.’
To be sure, the mainstream party out-group and their leader, Macron, are not the only source of these negative feelings and targets of negative affects. Zemmour supporters occasionally mention another out-group whose electoral success is associated with worry or disgust: the radical left out-group represented by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his party. However, as the coding table in Appendix C1 shows, these references seem less frequent in Zemmour supporters’ answers compared to the overwhelming mentions of Macron and his party. Respondents, therefore, focus on the winning out-group party.
In addition to parties and leaders, other groups were mentioned in respondents’ comments on elections. The most important alternative source of negative feelings and evaluations comes from blaming ‘the media’ and their ‘polls’. While this might not seem to relate to our expectations, the more fine-grained qualitative analysis of these answers reveals that these references often connect negative evaluations of the winning mainstream party and general criticism of the democratic system, opening the black box of the meaning of dissatisfaction with democracy. These open answers support our expectation that Zemmour voters tie together dissatisfaction with the system and the out-group party victory. About a third of Zemmour supporters make some criticism of the democratic process.Footnote 23 Among those, many criticize the result, the electoral process, and the existence of—at least- a media bias advantaging the mainstream party winner. At worst, respondents suggest that the democratic electoral process is ‘rigged’ and illegitimate, which is the main criticism of democracy made by Zemmour supporters.
Q8: ‘Rigged non-democratic election confiscated by the media subjected to the billionaire friends of Macron.’
Q9: ‘A media lockdown orchestrated by the outgoing president.’
Q10: ‘Given the fervor of the meetings of Éric Zemmour I thought he would be in the second round and I wonder if the results are not manipulated to make Macron elected.’
Q11: ‘Considering the media pressure and the pro “Macron” polls I am very bitter because everything is truncated and not at all unbiased.’
Overall, this qualitative analysis supports the experimental findings and shows how an affective response against the out-group win seem to overcome any utility gain from the electoral results. Respondents tie an out-group negative feeling to dissatisfaction with democracy, notably through perceived control of the system via the media. This may seem paradoxical to some, as Zemmour himself gained his own notoriety by his numerous appearances as a journalist and columnist in the French media, in particular in popular and mainstream media channels such as the Figaro newspaper, RTL Radio, and the 24/7 CNEWS TV channel, up until 6 months before the presidential election.
Beyond being solely illustrative of an affective mechanism, these statements are also consistent with a cognitive updating interpretation. Zemmour voters may rationalize the outcome as procedurally illegitimate rather than accept a defeat that conflicts with their prior beliefs. Alternatively, they may also reflect anti-establishment discursive strategies characteristic of radical and populist political elites, which often target an alleged ‘biased’ mainstream media system (Schumacher et al., Reference Schumacher2022).These qualitative excerpts provide suggestive evidence consistent with these alternative theoretical interpretations and highlights the potential interplay of the affective, cognitive, and political elites discursive mechanisms.
Comparing these answers to the other two blocks of respondents confirmed this distinctive pattern among, new, polarized, and losing voters. As mentioned earlier, even if showcasing almost as many negative affects towards Emmanuel Macron, the answers from Marine Le Pen supporters display more hopeful and enthusiastic statements about their candidate and the elections, in accordance with her second round winning potential. Second, they do not link the out-group negative affects, with an alleged control of the media, ‘rigged’ elections, or expressions of general dissatisfaction with democracy as Zemmour voters do.
Regarding the other parties’ supporters block, composed in great part by LREM and LFI party supporters, they express some polarized feelings towards the radical right out-group, especially in terms of feelings of fear and anxiety given their electoral success. Mélenchon’s supporters, another radical loser group, also express negative feelings about the electoral process and the working of democracy. Unlike Zemmour voters, this criticism rarely spills over to claims that the overall system is rigged, while more focus is put on more specific constitutional and electoral rules and wishes for reforms, proposals that were part of his political program.
To summarize, the qualitative evidence shows a third piece of evidence for an out-group, affective mechanism. Without prompt, the Zemmour block spontaneously expresses negative out-group feelings towards Macron and his party in an open-ended question about the election results. More importantly, many respondents link these negative affects with the idea that elections and the system are rigged. An underlying shared understanding of the election was that Macron had full control of the system and the election outcome by manipulating the media.
Other groups of party supporters do not link these ideas together, including other radical and polarized voters who lost the elections, such as Mélenchon’s supporters. However, our findings also suggest that Marine Le Pen voters may be subject to similar mechanisms in the case of defeat. Her block of supporters also express strong negative affect towards Macron as Zemmour’s block and surprisingly little positive evaluation of her or the system, even after winning the first round of presidential elections. This finding connects back to our study 1 results, where we find that Zemmour and Le Pen voters are indistinguishable from each other in terms of SWD after the second round of elections, once both candidates have lost the elections. Overall, both the experimental and qualitative evidence in our second mixed-methods study points towards the importance of the out-group negative affects in shaping SWD for radical voters following elections.
Conclusion
The electoral entry of new radical parties fail to boost their voters’ satisfaction with democracy. Our findings from two mixed-method studies provide a consistent explanation for this puzzle: what matters for these voters is that a hated opponent wins elections—not the increased political influence brought by their entry. Using the sudden emergence of the radical right party Reconquête in the 2022 French presidential election, we show that its already polarized supporters display even more negative feelings towards the winner Emmanuel Macron after the election, and that they primarily focus on these negative affects while evaluating the functioning of the democracy, which permeates their overall degree of satisfaction. By contrast, experimental and qualitative evidence reveals that the political benefits brought by their breakthrough are not taken into consideration when evaluating democracy in the electoral context.
Moreover, our analyses point to a series of scope conditions. First, winning an election, in contrast to electoral entry, may serve to reconcile radical voters with the democratic system. Le Pen voters, who by the time of our experiment were still likely to win the contest, do not express higher dissatisfaction when primed with the likely victory of Macron. In contrast, our panel data analysis reveals relatively lower SWD after losing the second round of the election, too. While some evidence already points towards this conclusion, for example looking at the case of Bolsonaro’s victory in Brazil (Cohen et al., Reference Cohen2022) and elsewhere (Fahey et al., Reference Fahey2022; Haugsgjerd, Reference Haugsgjerd2019; Juen, Reference Juen2023; Kołczyńska, Reference Kołczyńska2022; Rooduijn and Slageren, Reference Rooduijn and van Slageren2022), further research could explore the role of winning versus other types of electoral gains by tracing the over-time evolution of long-lived radical parties, like PVV in the Netherlands.
Second, the rank of negative affects may matter, and may do so beyond radical parties. ‘Other’ voters, whose main common feature is strong negative affect towards Zemmour’s Reconquête, also display a negative shift in SWD when framed with the possibility of Zemmour integrated into a radical right winning coalition in government. In particular, this is the case of LFI voters, who despite displaying negative affect towards Macron and LREM, do not experience an SWD decrease, probably because they hate even more RN and Reconquête, the likely loser and bigger loser, respectively. Further research should explore whether facing a strongly most-disliked winner impedes SWD boosts despite utility gains, beyond radical parties.
Some additional limitations must be highlighted. First, the French political context is a specific majoritarian and semi-presidential system, which may reduce the utility of electoral entry. We may expect that in proportional systems, where the distribution of power between winners and losers is less stark (Anderson and Guillory, Reference Anderson and Guillory1997; Martini and Quaranta, Reference Martini and Quaranta2019), negative affect towards an out-group winner may be less likely to preclude positive changes in SWD because of the larger utility of entry.
Second, our design does not allow us to disentangle the mechanisms through which out-group affect towards the winner affects SWD. While we have proposed three mechanisms—utilitarian, emotional, and cognitive—and our qualitative analysis lends support for the cognitive one, the three may interplay, and our design does not permit adjudicating between them. Further research should explore these mechanisms more directly. Similarly, alternative and potentially complementary explanations may activate or reinforce the link between an out-group win and SWD decrease, such as the discursive strategies of radical elites, particularly anti-system rhetoric. This possibility should be explored as well.
Third, the key strength of our design—its natural setting of a real-world radical party emergence and hard to reach voters—also came with the cost of a small sample size and statistical power. Future experimental research should replicate these findings in a well-powered study. Since natural radical party breakthroughs are rare, future works, contrary to our approach, may need to trade ecological validity for greater internal validity, either through more controlled designs or using a causal inference approach.
A fourth final limitation is the specificity of the qualitative data we rely on for our third study, which does not enable us to take a full-fledged interpretative or comparative approach across groups of voters. The open answers were constrained in terms of length, limiting the possible linkages and mechanisms more elaborate answers from our respondents would have allowed. However, the short length of these answers invited respondents to focus on their more salient feelings, reinforcing the strength of our conclusions. Thus, despite their limitations, our combined qualitative and quantitative studies offer robust and comprehensive evidence supporting our argument of an out-group affective-based effect on SWD.
Overall, this paper contributes to the literature on elections and democratic satisfaction by emphasizing the role of out-group identities in moderating more utilitarian considerations about the corrective role of representation for disengaged voters (Kaltwasser, Reference Kaltwasser2012; Mudde and Kaltwasser, Reference Kaltwasser2012). Affective polarization has been argued to enact support for illiberal policies among winners (Graham and Svolik, Reference Graham and Svolik2020) and defiance of the electoral results among the opposition losers (Kim and Hall, Reference Kim and Hall2023), but the evidence on its pernicious effects is contested (Broockman et al., Reference Broockman2023; Voelkel et al., Reference Voelkel2023), and some argue that a certain level of affective polarization can even be beneficial for democracy (Janssen and Turkenburg, Reference Janssen and Turkenburg2025; Kokkonen and Harteveld, Reference Kokkonen, Harteveld, Torcal and Harteveld2025). This paper contributes to the debate by proposing a channel through which dissatisfaction with democracy and affective polarization can reinforce each other, namely, impeding new party voters from engaging after breaking into the system. Thus, the integration of emerging radical parties may not be the cure to this vicious circle. On the contrary, it may feed further affective polarization and threaten the legitimacy of democratic systems in the long run. Ignoring entirely the benefits of entering the political system democratically on your first elections and questioning its legitimacy because of hatred towards your political opponent could weaken democratic stability, as accepting electoral (mis)fortunes is an unconditional element of the democratic game (Anderson et al., Reference Anderson2005). Our findings thus urge us to find tools to reduce negative partisan affects and enhance the visibility of the political benefits brought by political representation alone, reducing the political weight of winning and governing in voters’ minds.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755773926100575
Data availability statement
Data for Study 1 are drawn from the 2022 French Election Study (FES), available upon registration at the Sciences Po ELIPSS repository: https://data.sciencespo.fr/dataverse/elipss.
The quantitative data and replication files for Study 2 are publicly available at the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/4U8CTG. The replication files include a preprocessing script for waves 3 and 4 of the 2022 FES, required to replicate the analyses for Study 1.
The qualitative data for Study 2 are not publicly available in order to protect respondents’ privacy and anonymity, but may be obtained from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgements
We thank Tim Allinger, Chris Anderson, Daniel Bischof, Ruth Dassonneville, Elias Dinas, Kristian Vrede Skaaning Frederiksen, Sarah Hobolt, Matthew Levendusky, Sergi Martínez, Hanspeter Kriesi, Julian Schüssler, and Rune Slothuus for their helpful comments and insights on earlier versions of the manuscript, the pre-analysis plan and/or early ideas about the project. We would also wish to thank Anthony R. Brunello, Carol Galais, Stephen N. Goggin, Don Haider-Markel, Romain Lachat, Phillipe Maarek, Palle Svensson, Sophie Panel, and participants at the CERIUM-FMSH New Challenges to Democracy Workshop, the French politics panel of the 2022 APSA Annual Meeting, the Aarhus University Political Behaviour Workshop, the Sciences Po Grenoble 2022 ‘Research Label’ Seminar, the MPSA 2023 Conference, the JCPOP Barcelona 2023, and the DPSA 2023 Conference for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. We finally thank four anonymous reviewers whose comments have undoubtedly improved the manuscript. All the remaining errors and omissions are our own.
Funding statement
The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the European University Institute’s Mission Funding for Research Activities.
Competing interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical standards
The authors declare that this study is in complete conformity with all Principles and Guidance for Human Subjects Research adopted by the APSA Council on April 4th, 2020, and follows all requirements stated in the 2022 APSA Guide to Professional Ethics in Political Science. Extensive information about the research ethics of the project can be found in the supplementary materials.
Consent to participate
All study participants provided written consent to participate after being informed about the study’s goal and their rights.
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