After a national election, voters whose party loses tend to have significantly lower general trust in other people in society. New research published in journal election research We suggest that this decline is particularly strong among voters who harbor deep negative feelings toward the opposing party. These findings provide evidence that the competitive nature of modern politics may weaken the everyday social structures that help communities function.
Political scientists often distinguish between political trust and social trust. Political trust refers to the degree of trust that citizens have in government institutions, democratic processes, and elected officials. This type of trust is often directly related to whether a voter’s preferred candidate has the authority to implement a particular policy. Social trust, on the other hand, is a more generalized, everyday belief that unknown members of society are fundamentally honest and will behave according to shared moral rules.
Social trust is often considered a fundamental element of a healthy democracy. It fosters citizen participation, supports good governance, and helps communities work together to solve collective problems. Previously, experts believed that individuals’ levels of social trust were relatively stable and largely unaffected by the short-term consequences of political events.
To understand how voting results 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 examine this dynamic in Canada’s electoral districts. The research team focused on the idea that election results act as information signals. Once an election is over, the results give voters a rough estimate of how many of their fellow voters share their political views.
Psychological research shows that people tend to trust people who are similar to themselves. If voters believe that their party affiliation reflects a person’s deeper moral character, learning that a majority of the country voted for the opposing party can act as a negative shock. The researchers suspected that this perception might lead election losers to believe that the general public cannot be trusted.
They also expected that emotional polarization would widen this dynamic. Emotional polarization is a term used to describe the increasing tendency of voters to develop strong personal dislikes toward supporters of opposing political parties. If voters strongly dislike opposing factions, they are more likely to view opposing voters as immoral or dishonest. The authors noted that Canada, like many other modern democracies, has seen a marked 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 used responses from the Canadian Consortium for Election Research and Electoral Democracy, a large-scale academic project that tracks public opinion over time. The dataset included information from six national federal elections and 11 local elections.
In total, researchers analyzed information from more than 30,000 respondents and used a specific statistical model that focused on a sample of 17,570 to 27,813 people. The survey asked participants about their intended vote choice during the election period before the election took place. After the election, participants in the same survey were asked to answer standard questions measuring social trust.
This question asked respondents whether they felt most people could be trusted or whether they felt they needed to be very careful when dealing with others. The survey also asked participants to rate how they felt about each political party on a scale of 0 to 100. This allowed the researchers to calculate each voter’s level of emotional polarization by comparing their warm feelings toward their own party to their cold feelings toward the opposing party.
This data shows evidence of a consistent gap in social trust between those who supported the winners and those who supported the losers. After accounting for demographic factors such as age, gender, education, and employment status, the researchers found that election losers were about 3.8 percentage points less likely to express trust in others than supporters of the winner. This gap widened to about 6 percentage points when the analysis was restricted to supporters of the winning party and the first runner-up party.
Interestingly, voters’ pre-election expectations appear to play a major role in shaping post-election trust. Voters who supported the losing party but who confidently expected their party to win in advance experienced the greatest decline in social trust. Among these optimistic losers, there was a nearly 10 percentage point difference in social trust when compared to election winners.
The size of elections also appears to be important in shaping how people view their fellow citizens. The researchers found no significant gaps in social trust following sub-district or local elections. They suggest that national elections involving much larger numbers of voters provide stronger and more useful signals to voters about the character of the broader society.
The association between electoral defeat and declines in social trust was significantly moderated by the level of voter emotional polarization. Among voters who reported low levels of hostility toward the opposition, electoral defeat was not associated with a significant decline in social trust. For these less polarized people, learning that many people voted for a different party does not seem to change their fundamental beliefs in humanity.
The picture looked very different for highly polarized voters who strongly disliked the opposing party. Among these voters, the gap in social trust between winners and losers amounted to about 10 percentage points. The information signals that voters receive from elections appear to be interpreted through the lens of personal distaste for completely opposing parties.
The authors also found that the trust gap was most pronounced in the 2019 and 2021 national elections. According to the research data, these particular election years had the highest emotional polarization in Canada over the 20-year study period. In previous elections, when voters expressed less hostility toward rival parties, the researchers found that there were no significant differences in social trust between winners and losers.
There are some important limitations to keep in mind when interpreting these results. Because the design of this study relies heavily on observational survey data, it cannot conclusively prove that losing an election directly changes trust in others. The observed differences in confidence may be influenced by other unmeasured factors, such as changes in the political environment, particular candidate candidacies, or broader economic conditions in a given election year.
The data also lacks a true control group of voters who were completely unaware of the election results. Because all citizens experience the results of national elections at the same time, researchers have only been able to compare winners and losers. They could not compare election losers to a neutral baseline of individuals who received no information signals.
Future research could attempt to replicate these findings using different methodologies, such as behavioral games, to see whether self-reported distrust leads to actual discriminatory behavior toward strangers. Scientists could also expand this study to a larger cross-national sample of elections to see whether these patterns hold outside of Canada’s political system. Exploring potential interventions to reduce partisan hostility may also help researchers understand whether moderating political tribalism can protect everyday social cohesion.
The study, “Election Results and Social Trust in an Era of Polarization,” was authored by Mark Williamson, Amber Hye-Yon Lee, Daniel Rubenson, Iva Srbinovska, David Sumantry, Jonah Davids, Annika Maulucci, and Kristina Kisin.
