The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Danny Yihan Jia, whose focus is on the global crisis in electoral legitimacy. The US is an obvious example here, with some 60 lawsuits relating to supposed electoral irregularities filed by Donald Trump after the 2020 election alone (all failed, of course); similar developments have taken place in Brazil, Kenya, and many other countries, and the ‘rigged election’ narratives are often translated from one country to another even though they lack any evidence.
Some of this can be credited to a ‘sore loser’ effect: losers believe the election was rigged, while for winners their beliefs in election fraud tend to disappear. However, in the US this is no longer the case: even after Trump’s (legitimate) win in the 2024 election, Republicans still tend to believe that US elections are generally rigged, and this cannot be addressed through fact-checks.
Social identity theory might explain this: social identity leads to partisan belief formation, and such beliefs lead to motivated reasoning that protects partisan status and group belonging. In this sense, repeated fraud narratives become long-standing partisan identity cues which persist even after one’s party wins an election. Such processes may also be affected by levels of political social media use, willingness to consider belief-inconsistent evidence, and political partisanship.
The present paper explores this through two survey waves, conducted after the 2020 and 2024 US presidential elections with some 1,000 to 1,200 participants. It turns out that winning the 2024 election did not reverse the pattern that Republicans were more likely to believe in election fraud; both sides’ beliefs declined, though Republicans’ declined somewhat more. Even after winning the 2024 election, Republicans also still believed the 2020 election was rigged, in fact. Higher levels of open-mindedness reduced fraud beliefs, but more so for Democrats than Republicans.
Overall, then, winning elections does not fully neutralise fraud beliefs, though it does reduce their salience; instead, strategic fraud narratives may raise the baseline to which winning resets the belief level. The partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats might point to what they consider to be reliable evidence of electoral fraud – this points to the post-truth information environments with which the two sides engage.
All of this research was connected in the specific context of Trumpian electoral politics in the US, of course; how this would play out with other political actors has yet to be tested.
