What Winners Owe Losers

A mandate to govern is not a licence to conquer.

During an election, candidates spend weeks arguing that the other side would leave the public poorer, families weaker and society less fair or less free.

Then ballots are counted, and someone has to make a concession speech. The losing candidate walks onto a stage, faces a room full of disappointed supporters and asks them to accept the authority of the person they have just spent a month (or more) of their life trying to defeat.

The losing candidate does this because democracy requires it.

Political scientists call this “losers’ consent”: the willingness of those who lose an election to recognize the result, accept the winner’s authority and remain within the democratic system.

No democracy can survive if each defeated party declares the election fraudulent, treats the government as inherently illegitimate or attempts to overturn the result outside constitutional means.

This is well-worn ground. But we talk less often about the other side of the bargain.

Winning an election grants the authority to govern. It does not confer ownership of the country, province or city. It does not prove that the winner’s supporters are the only authentic citizens or that the places that voted differently are alien territory.

It does not permit a government to stack the deck against their opponents, and it does not require the defeated to confess their cultural or moral inferiority or otherness, or to be humiliated or shamed.

Democratic restraint is reciprocal: I accept your temporary authority; you accept my permanent equality.

Increasingly, it feels like neither winners nor losers are particularly interested in holding up their side of this bargain.

SOME CONDITIONS APPLY

Canadians overwhelmingly say they believe in democracy – though perhaps less overwhelmingly than we like to believe.

In a 2022 Angus Reid Institute survey, 86% of Canadians said democracy was a good or great way to govern. However, in the same survey, 16% said it would be good or great to have a strong leader who did not have to bother with Parliament or elections. Another 12% were unsure.

In other words, more than one-quarter of Canadians did not clearly reject an explicitly authoritarian form of government.¹

The danger is subtler and more insidious than millions of people consciously desiring dictatorship.

It’s that a growing segment of the population support the mechanics of democracy, but with some very undemocratic conditions attached.

They support free elections provided the public chooses their side. They support institutional restraint provided it constrains the other side. They defend the system until the system produces an outcome they find intolerable.

Democracy enjoys broad support until its rules require us to lose.

THE PRICE OF LOSING

That conditional attachment to democracy is usually discussed as a failure of the loser but the loser represents only one side of the bargain. The winner has a role to play in defining the stakes of losing.

Democracy is not “I have 51% of the vote so I get 100% of the power.” Democracy is not an activity that occurs when you mark an X once every four years.

Democracy is a civic concept rooted in sharing power and collective decisions. It is compromise, it is collaboration, it is accommodation.

It is restraint, exercised daily.

Without this restraint, defeat becomes humiliation, and the price of losing becomes intolerable for people.

Defeat says: you did not persuade enough people this time. Humiliation says: your defeat reveals what kind of people you are.

Political humiliation is more than incivility. It is not simply harsh language, partisan disagreement or the occasional joke at an opponent’s expense.

Humiliation turns a contest over public choices into a judgment about civic status. It tells rural citizens that they are backward, urban citizens that they are decadent, religious citizens that they are dangerous, secular citizens that they are rootless, progressives that they hate the country, and conservatives that they have no place in its future.

The categories vary but the message is the same: the winner represents real citizens, while the losers are merely permitted to live here.

People can accept losing a choice. A policy can be changed. A government can be defeated.

But when a loss becomes a verdict on your status in society – whether people like you belong – ordinary political loss feels existential.

And if the consequences of losing appear existential, almost any measure can be justified to prevent it.

HUMILIATION HAS BEEN POLITICALLY USEFUL

Humiliation travels because it activates one of our strongest social instincts: the division of the world into people like us and people unlike us.

It converts complex policy questions into clear contests between the righteous and the ridiculous. It offers the pleasure of dominance without the harder work of persuasion or accommodation.

A policy achievement may take years and involve compromise. Humiliating an opponent takes seconds.

It also helps leaders conceal the limits of their own power. Supporters who have been given few material victories can be offered symbolic ones.

They may not receive better public services, greater economic security or a more effective government, but they can watch people they dislike be made angry or afraid. Humiliation becomes a substitute for accomplishment.

But it also creates a constituency for retaliation. People who have been told that their defeat proves their inferiority wait for the opportunity to reverse the hierarchy.

Politics built around making the other side pay eventually leaves everyone waiting for their turn. Eventually, some begin to wonder why power should change hands at all.

DEMOCRACY IS MORE THAN AN ELECTION EVERY FOUR YEARS

Winners’ restraint is not exercised only by governments on election night. It is a habit required of parties, institutions and citizens during the other 1,400 days.

People will tolerate defeat when they believe it is temporary, procedurally fair, limited in its consequences, compatible with continued civic equality and reversible through future persuasion and elections.

Those conditions allow a defeated citizen to say: I disagree with this decision, but I remain part of the group that made it. I can organize, argue, vote and try again.

Humiliation undermines every one of those conditions.

It tells the loser: your defeat proves your inferiority, the winner represents the “real” citizens, your community is an obstacle to progress, your views place you beyond respectable society, there may be no route back except retaliation.

The politics of humiliation do not merely make democracy unpleasant. They make support for democracy conditional. When losing means degradation, people become willing to sacrifice democratic rules rather than submit to defeat.

It is ordinary civic behaviour but democratic institutions demand democratic habits.

To work together when they can. To disagree when they must.

Institutions depend on countless decisions. They do not work when people take every opportunity to exploit an advantage, escalate every conflict or treat every opponent as an enemy.

Democracy demands something more difficult than periodic voting. It requires us to keep cooperating with people after we have failed to persuade them.

This is not a plea for niceness or endless compromise. The objective is not a democracy without conflict.

Some policies do real harm. Some arguments are dishonest. Some conduct is corrupt, discriminatory or anti-democratic and should be described plainly. A commitment to human dignity does not require us to pretend that every idea is equally valid or to avoid any position of principles.

Governments must decide. Legislatures must vote. Courts must rule.

The distinction is between defeating an argument and degrading the person who made it, between exercising authority and asserting superiority, between holding people accountable and denying that they remain members of the same political community.

THE OTHER HALF OF THE RITUAL

On election night, the losing candidate steps onto a stage.

They thank their family, their campaign team, their volunteers and the people who placed their confidence in them. They acknowledge the disappointment in the room. Then they concede.

It is an act of extraordinary democratic restraint. The candidate possesses a microphone, an audience and every emotional incentive to cast doubt on the result. Instead, they tell supporters that the contest is over, the outcome must be respected, and the work of citizenship continues.

But the burden cannot rest entirely on the losing candidate.

The winner’s speech is usually called a victory speech. But it, too, should be understood as a democratic concession: an acknowledgment that winning office does not mean winning ownership of society.

The loser must recognize they lost. The winner must recognize that they govern for all – that victory is temporary, that those who voted differently remain equal citizens, and that a mandate to govern is not a licence to conquer.

That is the democratic bargain concealed within the rituals of election night:

The loser concedes the winner’s temporary authority. The winner concedes the loser’s permanent equality.

1. The results were worse in the United States, where support for authoritarianism was nearly identical among people who had voted for Donald Trump and those who had voted for Joe Biden: 23 and 22 percent respectively.

That suggests the temptation is not confined to one ideology. People may distrust unchecked power when it is exercised by their opponents while imagining that it would be safe or even desirable in the hands of their own side.