Anticipating disappointment in expectations for politics

Democracy requires that every citizen experience loss. But in practice, hierarchical societies result in unequal distributions of loss. Higher status groups lose less frequently than lower status groups. How do individuals who frequently lose cope with repeated loss? I propose that one way frequent losers navigate democracy is by preemptively expecting to lose. Setting expectations in anticipation of loss makes losses less painful when they occur. I motivate this claim using theory from social psychology about how we mentally prepare for disappointing outcomes, and theory from behavioral economics about reference-dependence, or how people evaluate outcomes in terms of whether they are relatively better or worse than a reference outcome. Using a measure of utility that incorporates both ideal outcomes and expected outcomes, I provide two pieces of evidence for a long-standing claim that Black Americans’ diminished expectations explain their relatively muted anger at loss. First, lowered expectations mean that positive outcomes exceed Black expectations by a larger margin than they exceed white expectations, and negative outcomes fall short of Black expectations by a smaller margin than they fall short of white expectations. Second, lower expectations among Black Americans does not lead to greater excitement when expectations are exceeded. Instead, lower expectations affect politics by numbing Black reactions to outcomes that are worse than expected. These results add to work that uses reference-dependence to explain political behavior, as well as knowledge on how status determines individual orientations to democracy.