Marginal Revolution spotlights a new study:
Pierce, Rogers and Snyder find that political partisans are more upset about an election loss than a random sample of parents were upset by the Newtown shootings.
Partisan identity shapes social, mental, economic, and physical life. Using a novel dataset, we study the well-being consequences of partisan identity by examining the immediate hedonic impact of electoral loss and victory. We employ a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity model that minimizes many of the inferential biases associated with surveys. First, we find that elections strongly affect the well-being of partisan losers (for about a week), but minimally impact partisan winners. This is consistent with research on the goodbad hedonic asymmetry. Second, the well-being consequences to partisan losers are intense. To illustrate, we show that partisans are affected two times more intensely by their party losing the U.S. Presidential Election than both respondents with children were to the Newtown Shootings and respondents living in Boston were to the Boston Marathon Bombings. We discuss implications regarding the centrality of partisan identity to the self and its well-being, and the methodological contribution.The authors suggest that the happiness effects of political losses are surprisingly large but they would have done better to compare elections with something people really care about, sports (and here). Sports and politics share the same irrational attachment to a team, the only difference being that the rivalries and hatreds of the former rarely lead to as much death and destruction as the latter.
