Date of Award

6-26-2026

Date Published

August 2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Political Science

Advisor(s)

Johanna Dunaway

Subject Categories

Political Science | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

The transfer of executive power through free and fair elections is the cornerstone of democracy. However, losers' consent is a fundamental requirement for the peaceful transfer of power through elections. In advanced democracies, due to the long series of free and fair elections and frequent electoral turnovers, there is an implicit assumption about the status of elections as the mechanism to shape the structure of representative government and resolve societal conflicts. Voters naturally occupy a central role in the maintenance of this societal consensus. Therefore, factors that affect the voter experience - voter satisfaction and voter confidence - are normatively important topics due to their potential wide-ranging effects. In the first paper, I focus on the first part of voter experience and ask whether partisanship can impact voter satisfaction, especially considering the increasing levels of affective polarization in the United States. Using data from surveys and county-level results in the presidential elections of 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024, I find that voter interactions with aspects of election administration largely defines their perceptions of elections. However, I also find that partisanship is turning elections into a zero-sum game where winners and losers react in similar ways and that partisans are reacting to out-party vote margin in their evaluations. This effect is consistent among Republicans and there is suggestive evidence that it is emerging among Democrats as well. The finding points to the formation of a perceptual threshold set by the out-party vote margin and fueled by partisan animus. This threshold is complicating objective evaluation of election administration where even voters' positive voting experience and the presence of objective information about elections will not determine voter perceptions about election administration, also known as voter satisfaction. In the second paper, I take a causal inference approach to the same question to see if the effects uncovered in the first paper are causal. I use the same dataset to construct matched datasets with balanced covariates and estimate the causal effect of high victory margin on the odds of similar partisans in similar counties expressing highest level of voter satisfaction. I find that -among the partisans of the winning party- the odds are higher when they are treated with high vote margin. I conduct sensitivity analysis and find that the results are likely to be causal. The second part of the voter experience is voter confidence and I turn to this vital topic in the third paper. The tumultuous presidential elections post-2000 engendered a heightened sense of urgency to improve voter confidence in American elections. The explanations for worsening voter confidence center around partisanship. Prescriptions for the improvement of voter confidence start with the assumption behind the electoral reforms post-2000, namely that well-run elections increased voter confidence. Therefore, various aspects of election administration are pointed out as areas of practical improvement. However, studies show that the effects of election administration are shadowed by partisanship. There are other potential factors that can affect voter confidence. One such contextual factor is inequality in the United States. Can inequality exert a downward pressure on voter confidence? Using data from surveys and county-level results in the last four presidential elections in 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024, I find that regardless of election outcome, inequality at the county level exerts a downward pressure on voter confidence at the county level. As inequality seems to magnify the winner/loser effect, these preliminary findings suggest that inequality needs to be a part of the discussion on voter confidence in the United States. These three papers together present new evidence and point to new avenues of research on voter experience in the United States.

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