‘Undeserving winners’ or ‘undeserved losers’? Two types of societal discontent and their relation to vote choice

Normative evaluations of shifts in social hierarchies have emerged as a central factor in understanding recent electoral transformations. In particular, far right supporters have been shown to resent challenges to the traditional social order championed by the progressive left. In this paper, we theorise and study a still more fundamental difference in the social discontent expressed by these political camps. While far right supporters tend to resent the ascent of perceived-to-be ‘undeserving winners’ of status, progressive left voters should focus relatively more on groups seen as unjustly underprivileged, i.e., ‘undeserved losers’. The former is in line with a zero-sum mindset, while the latter is consistent with endorsing a more universalist political agenda. Drawing on open-ended survey responses from an original survey conducted in Germany, we explore how individuals normatively assess changes in the social order. Through a combination of word embedding techniques and qualitative analysis, we investigate the gap between respondents' ideals and their perceptions of evolving status hierarchies. Our findings reveal that concerns about ‘undeserving winners’ are prevalent among far right voters, but less so among progressive left (Green) voters. Electoral realignment, we argue, has made this difference more central to political competition.