Just five days after the election, reported happiness among Republicans was back up to 60 per cent. William Watson,
U.S. study found Republicans sad for only a few days after Obama victory
Party leaders who lose general elections can suffer disappointment that lasts years, maybe even the rest of their lives. Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair therefore have a lot at stake this year.
Their partisan supporters? Not so much. A new working paper from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government suggests Republican partisans were hit hard by Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, but that the self-reported effects wore off after about a week.
The three social-science PhDs who did the study — Lamar Pierce of Washington University in St Louis, Todd Rogers of the Kennedy School and Jason A. Snyder at UCLA — used daily Internet data on Americans’ selfreported level of happiness to track the response of Democrats and Republicans to the election results. How did they do it?
It’s amazing what people tell the Internet. A six-yearold Pittsburgh start-up called CivicScience invites users across the Internet to answer various questions. The come-on the day I logged on was “How often do you go to the movies?” I didn’t bite. But hundreds of thousands of people apparently do. The sampling obviously isn’t random: It only catches the opinions of people who both use the Internet and are willing to share. But CivicScience can use cross-checks with other sources and demographic data their users provide to figure out how representative their surveys are. Reasonably representative, they conclude.
The “Losing Hurts” study, as the three scholars call it, used a daily CivicScience survey on “How happy are you today: very happy, happy, so so, unhappy, or very unhappy?” to examine what happened to people’s answers in the days following the election. Though Democrats’ reported happiness basically didn’t change, Republicans’ plummeted. The day before the election 60 per cent had said they were either “very happy” or “happy.” The day after only 30 per cent did.
That was a big hit to happiness, bigger even, the researchers found, than the decline in happiness U. S. parents reported in the days following the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting in December 2012 or Bostonians reported right after the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013.
But it also passed quickly. Just five days after the election, reported happiness among Republicans was back up to 60 per cent.
What should we take from these data? It’s only one study. It may well be the first of its kind, or as the researchers put it in impeccable academese, “the first paper to map the contours of hedonic adaptation to societal events at this level of granularity.” And it maps a Republican loss, so it offers no insight into how Democrats would respond to losing. (Maybe 2016 will tell.)
All that said, the study suggests both that the pain of losing an election exceeds the joy of winning it, an asymmetry social psychologists see in lots of human events, and that, as the authors put it, “partisan identity is even more central to the self than past research suggests.”
If that means the childish but apparently sincere partisanship on daily display in question period is a true reflection of participants’ “selfs,” do we have to solemnly respect the identities thus revealed or can we continue to denounce the shenanigans as puerile, demeaning and debasing?
Nor does it necessarily follow that what’s true in the U.S. is also true in Canada. Canadians aren’t Americans, even if our differences aren’t as great as some Canadians insist. And Canadian Conservatives aren’t U.S. Republicans, despite what their Liberal and NDP opponents claim. Our partisans’ reactions to an election loss may therefore be different.
What would be really interesting to learn is whether the reported happiness of Canadians who don’t consider themselves partisan trends up or down in the years following the election as the elected government’s wise or unwise policies affect their lives for good or ill.