This article lists an overall summary and critique overview of the journal article “Losing Hurts: The Happiness Impact of 2 Partisan Electoral Loss”; a journal article contained in the Journal of Experimental Political Science. The article focuses on the reactions a partisan may have or display following a general election. According to Pierce, Rogers, and Snyder (3), partisans base their social-economic and psychological aspects of lives around political parties as well as general elections and are, therefore, heavily impacted when their party wins or loses an election. The purpose of the article, therefore, was to establish if partisans are significantly hurt by an electoral loss and, if yes, to what extent. To achieve substantial results, the study embarked on a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity (RD) model to gauge the emotional behavior of different partisans all over the U.S. before and after the occurrence of a general presidential election. The RD model regressed poll data collected and compiled by Civic Science, a web-based polling and data intelligence platform. Poll data was collected daily and compiled into two forms: i) The control group (poll data collected before the Election Day ii) The treatment/treated group (data collected after the election day). These two groups of data are then regressed against each other to distinguish the changes in partisans’ feelings and responses before and after the focal event, which in this case, is the presidential Election Day in 2012. The results obtained show that partisans whose select political parties lose the elections are exceedingly hurt with an electoral loss than those who win. These results are consistent with other researchers such as Baumeister et al. (2001) who point out that people tend to process negative outcomes/ information more vigorously than positive outcomes. (), however, stress that the pain of losing is, however, short-lived because people also tend to forget or overcome adverse situations quite fast.
Critique
Responses to mass disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, city-wide shootings, floods, and bombings, on the contrary, critique the claim by Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, and Vohs (325) that people overcome negative outcomes fast. The consequences of these mass calamities seem to be deep-rooted even in the present-day society for example the effects of Hurricane Katrina and the Genocide can still be remembered up to day (Baumeister et al. 326). Also, findings show that people are more affected by general elections than mass tragedies. The reason for this is people tend to be more involved in these political events and even help fund their parties or candidates who are running for a parliamentary seat; whereas they are not actively involved in the occurrence of mass tragedies. An example of two major tragedies that occurred in the U.S. in line with the 2012 general elections were the Newton shootings and the bombings during the Boston Marathon. Data on these two calamities were also collected using the same online platform, CivicScience, and compared against the electoral performance. Respondents recorded more disappointment in losing the elections than in accounting for the aftermath of the shootings and bombings. These results only serve to show that people are only heavily impacted by events in which they have personal interests (Baumeister et al. 328). In other words, partisans whose parties lose the elections are only hurt because they have personal interests in electoral affairs; otherwise, they would not be affected at all if they had no interest in political events.
Works Cited
Baumeister, Roy, Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin Finkenauer, and Kathleen Vohs. “Bad is Stronger 312 than Good”, Review of General Psychology, vol. 5, no. 4, 2001, pp. 323-70.
Pierce, Lamar, Todd Rogers, and Jason Snyder. “Losing Hurts: The Happiness Impact of 2 Partisan Electoral Loss”, Journal of Experimental Political Science,
2015, pp. 1-16.
