Electoral Hope

Abstract

It is well established in political science that those who favour an election outcome tend to say it has a higher chance of success than those who oppose it. This tendency towards so-called ‘wishful thinking’ is often treated as a problem for democracy because it shows that voters are, as the term suggests, irrational. In this article, I make the case that partisan electoral expectations are significant not because they demonstrate widespread irrationality, but because they show how voters make sense of their role in democracies. I provide an alternative account of partisan electoral expectations as following a principle of electoral hope. On this account, partisan electoral expectations are rational in a practical, if not necessarily theoretical, sense.

Where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the ‘lowest kind of immorality’ into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives!

– William James (1896: 24–25)

Those who favour an election outcome tend to say it has a higher chance of success than those who oppose it. Having already been characterised almost a century ago as ‘a very real phenomenon of political life’ (Hayes, 1932: 190), this pattern has become one of the most well established in political science, emerging in ‘all types of elections . . . across various countries’ (Graefe, 2014: 208). The tendency to express such partisan electoral expectations is usually studied under the title of wishful thinking. In political science, wishful thinking has come to be seen as a significant problem to solve in both senses: an empirical puzzle to piece together and a normative obstacle to overcome.

As the term suggests, accounts of wishful thinking generally treat it as irrational. Voters who engage in wishful thinking live ‘in a dream world’ (Granberg and Holmberg, 1986: 380). Therefore, scholars commonly take a normative stance against wishful thinking. They deem it ‘valuable’ (Rose and Aspiras, 2020: 412) to find ways to ‘remedy’ (Babad, 1997) this ‘undesirable’ phenomenon (Tikochinski and Babad, 2022: 252).

In this article, I challenge this account and its implications. To do so, I employ a well-established philosophical distinction between theoretical reason and practical reason. The wishful thinking account applies the standards of theoretical reason, which are appropriate to assessing the rationality of knowledge-like beliefs about the world. However, for a voter, an election is not a theoretical matter, but a practical matter – its results are not something they are primarily in the business of predicting, but of producing. It is therefore important, before dismissing them out of hand as theoretically irrational, to consider partisan electoral expectations from the standpoint of practical reason – the standards governing rational action.

I offer such a practical account. I argue that the phenomenon known as wishful thinking can be understood in terms of a principle of electoral hope. Voters act towards uncertain election outcomes by voting for them. To be rational, doing so relies, by default, on the possibility that this vote is a contribution towards an outcome that will be realised – not a lost cause, but a hopeful prospect. To the extent that the outcome is uncertain, this principle of electoral hope provides voters with a practical reason to maintain a belief that the outcome can be produced, supporting their hope in the possibility that that it will happen. So it is the action of voting that practically justifies partisan electoral expectations. I also consider the slightly different idea that the practical identity of partisanship could rationally justify partisan electoral expectations. But for electoral hope to be justified in either of these ways, voters must act, or maintain practical identities that incline them to act, towards the outcomes they hope for – usually, but not necessarily, by voting for it. And they must be making decisions about these things rationally, really trying to work out which election outcomes it is right for them to promote, and thereby ideally doing their moral and political duty.

In presenting these arguments, I make a threefold contribution to the literature. First, electoral hope can reinvigorate a ‘field [that] is rather quiet’, with ‘sporadic evidence of [wishful thinking] in elections accumulating over the years’ but few ‘theoretical innovations’ (Tikochinski and Babad, 2022: 252). This alternative account resolves some puzzles and poses new, promising, productive ones. Second, electoral hope provides reasons for scholars to redirect their energies away from the potentially misguided search for interventions to override wishful thinking. Third, I point to where they might channel those energies: to understanding why voters end up entertaining false hopes – defined as outcomes they should not hope for in a primarily practical or moral sense, as opposed to outcomes they should not expect in a primarily theoretical or epistemic sense.

But more broadly, electoral hope promises to bring the ostensibly niche phenomenon of partisan electoral expectations to the attention of the wider discipline of politics and international relations. By pitching electoral hope as a principle of practically rational action, I suggest that it is noteworthy not because it signals an epistemic problem in our democracies that needs to be solved, but because it helps us understand how voters rationally participate in those democracies. This argument contributes to defending democracy itself against critics concerned about the folly and irrationality of voters.

Wishful Thinking: A Theoretical Account

Political scientists consistently observe that there is an association between people’s electoral preferences and their electoral expectations (Babad, 1997; Barnfield et al., 2025b; Barnfield and Johns, 2025; Delavande and Manski, 2012; Granberg and Brent, 1983; Granberg and Holmberg, 1986; Krizan et al., 2010; Meffert et al., 2011; Mongrain, 2021; Morisi and Leeper, 2022; Tikochinski and Babad, 2022). This effect manifests in many subtly different forms, across contexts and approaches to measurement (Graefe, 2014: 208). For example, almost a century ago, Hayes (1932) found that a majority of people from different socio-demographic groups expected their preferred US presidential election candidate to win. More recently, Mongrain (2021) has found, in various elections, that supporters of the winning party are more likely to correctly predict the election outcome. It is important to note that although similar such patterns emerge consistently, voters rarely ‘indulge in rampant fantasy’ (Babad and Yacobos, 1993: 50). For example, Democrats in 2008 did not see Obama’s victory as inevitable, while Republicans thought it impossible; those who definitely intended to vote for Obama rated his chances of winning at about 60% while those who definitely did not intend to vote for him rated those chances around 40% (Delavande and Manski, 2012). This tendency is commonly dubbed wishful thinking.

Such abiding attention to this wishful thinking raises the question of why it matters so much to political scientists. The answer appears to be that scholars see wishful thinking as ‘undesirable’ (Tikochinski and Babad, 2022: 251). It is deemed ‘valuable’ to understand how to reduce wishful thinking (Rose and Aspiras, 2020: 412). Some seek variables that might ‘attenuate’ (Dolan and Holbrook, 2001; Mongrain, 2021), ‘mitigate’ (Levine, 2007), or ‘rationalise’ it (Stiers and Dassonneville, 2018). Others attempt to ‘remedy’ it experimentally (Babad, 1997). But why?

For one thing, wishful thinking concerns political scientists because holding partisan electoral expectations might have negative effects on voters’ other attitudes and behaviour. For example, voters might not recognise opportunities for strategic voting if they overrate their preferred outcome’s chances. As Searles et al. (2018: 889) argue, ‘in a world without wishful thinking, partisans could devote more resources to candidates that stood a better chance of success’. Wishful thinking could also lead partisans to abstain – voters over-estimating their side’s chances might ‘[feel] a trip to the polls unnecessary’ and that it is ‘“safe” to abstain in the circumstances’ (Levine and Roberts, 1991: 148). A separate concern is that partisans with overstated expectations for their side could also be prone to ‘negative reactions after elections that could lead to antagonism toward . . . the civic process itself’ (Krizan et al., 2010: 146), with ‘important implications for the legitimacy of democratic institutions’ (Searles et al., 2018: 906).

However, these concerns are not my focus here. They rest on specific empirical claims that require empirical evidence which I cannot provide. And I would need to, because it is scant. Indeed, although there have been efforts to study the effect of ‘disconfirmed expectancies’ on diffuse political support, this work finds that ‘surprised losers do not appear more likely than other voters to question the legitimacy of election outcomes’ (Mongrain, 2023: 1598; see also Blais and Gélineau, 2007; Hollander, 2014). I nonetheless return to these claims in the conclusion, pointing out that on my practical account of partisan electoral expectations, they lose much of their purchase.

My focus, instead, is on theoretical and normative accounts of wishful thinking that raise concerns about the phenomenon in itself. Such treatments suggest that wishful thinking involves voters paying greater heed to positive information than to negative information when updating their expectations over time. ¹ Rose and Aspiras (2020: 412) state that ‘people differentially select and evaluate evidence when determining the likelihood of desired outcomes compared with undesired ones’. ² For Searles et al. (2018: 894), ‘people are motivated to accept information that suggests their preferred candidate will win, and discount information that suggests they might lose’. For Mongrain (2021: 11), ‘individuals have a tendency to disregard or downplay information or cues pointing towards the defeat of their preferred party or political arrangement and to overemphasize what they see as information favouring the scenario they wish to see happen’.

These patterns trouble political scientists because they do not reflect the kind of rational information processing that is expected of voters when thinking about elections. The ‘preferred basis of judgment’ in forming electoral expectations is ‘accurate information’ (Dolan and Holbrook, 2001: 28), because the election context is ‘recognized as demanding objectivity, thoughtfulness, and rational use of information’ (Babad et al., 1992: 465). ³ So Granberg and Holmberg (1986: 389) claim that ‘in a purely rational democratic situation, there would be no room for wishful thinking, which is essentially irrational in nature’. Many other studies of wishful thinking explicitly mention (ir)rationality, if sometimes only in passing (e.g. Babad, 1997; Babad et al., 1992; Babad and Yacobos, 1993; Meffert et al., 2011; Mongrain, 2021; Searles et al., 2018; Uhlaner and Grofman, 1986), or they pit it against ‘cognition’ as a form of ‘affect’ (Babad, 1997; Dolan and Holbrook, 2001; Stiers and Dassonneville, 2018), or label it a ‘bias’ (Levine, 2007; Mongrain, 2021; Rose and Aspiras, 2020). Tikochinski and Babad (2022: 251–252, emphasis added) summarise the ‘consensual view’ well when arguing that reducing wishful thinking (‘WT’) would be ‘of high value’, and

much of the research in this domain has been devoted to attempts to identify . . . mechanisms that might reduce WT bias and lead voters to be as rational and objective as possible . . . The fact that researchers keep trying to search for means for debiasing WT indicates that they probably assume that voters are indeed capable of predicting election results rationally.

This critique operates within the framework of theoretical reason: standards for the formation of correct beliefs – that is, knowledge – about the world. We are reasoning theoretically when, ‘in the first instance’, we change our ‘beliefs and expectations’ (Harman, 2004: 48). When ‘true and appropriately grounded’, those beliefs ‘constitute knowledge’ (Audi, 2004: 18). ⁴ So we are rational in a theoretical sense when we reason in ways that reliably lead to forming knowledge. For example, if Isaac believes that gravity is a force between objects, but Albert shows that the orbit of Mercury is inconsistent with that theory, theoretical reason dictates that Isaac should question and ultimately revise his belief, and consequently adjust his predictions of the motion of celestial objects. As Wallace (2020) explains:

Looking backward to events that have already taken place, theoretical reason asks why they have occurred; looking forward, it attempts to determine what is going to happen in the future. In these ways, theoretical reflection is concerned with matters of fact and their explanation. Furthermore it treats these issues in impersonal terms that are accessible (in principle) to anyone. Theoretical reasoning, understood along these lines, finds paradigmatic expression in the natural and social sciences.

It is by the standards of theoretical reason that we judge partisan electoral expectations to be irrational. An election will take place and will have a certain result against which voters’ expectations can be judged as accurate or inaccurate. Before it takes place, there is evidence available about what is likely to happen, and the way voters use that evidence to form their expectations can favour, or fall short of favouring, the eventual accuracy of their prediction. Only paying attention, or paying special attention, to the evidence conducive to the outcome they prefer or vote for biases people in a predictable direction away from correct beliefs. Anyone can in principle look at these expectations from a third-person theoretical perspective and judge partisans as right or wrong, as heedful or heedless of the evidence, as holding correct or incorrect beliefs about – that is, in the limit, knowing or not knowing – what is coming. When we do that, we observe that the extent to which their beliefs are correct depends on which outcome they prefer. Democratic voters tend to think it more likely the Democratic candidate will win the presidential election, and Republicans tend to think it more likely the Republican will win. So we assume that they are being theoretically irrational: ignoring relevant information, or interpreting it in biased ways.

It is unfortunate to have reached this conclusion, for three reasons. First, it casts voters in a negative light, potentially creating the perception that they are ‘irrational fools’ (Babad and Yacobos, 1993: 37). This view may feed into a broader derision of voters as responsible for ‘foolish policies’ (Caplan, 2008: 22), and scepticism about the value of democracy itself (Brennan, 2016). That criticism might be unfair. Second, this conclusion causes us to spend resources searching for elusive ways to override wishful thinking. If the wishful thinking account is wrong, then the search is wastefully misguided. And third, the negative normative conclusion we have reached itself provides a clue that our assumptions might indeed be off-track, validating those first two concerns. Callard (2018: 54) argues that:

[w]hen we encounter evidence that a domain of rational agency is characteristically (or even just often) peopled by agents who fail with respect to the relevant norms, we need to consider the possibility that we haven’t quite grasped the phenomenon, or its norms.

I submit that political science may not quite have grasped the phenomenon of partisan electoral expectations, or its norms. Holding voters’ expectations to the standard of theoretical reason is natural for social scientists because theoretical reason is the foremost standard to which we hold ourselves as scientists. But theoretical reason is not the primary standard to which we – or anyone else – hold ourselves as voters. As a voter, I am ‘not an independent rational observer who estimates objectively a given situation for which I am not responsible’ (Murdoch, 1999: 123). From voters’ perspective, such ‘detachment’ would be ‘a luxury’ (Goldman, 2023: 43). Elections are primarily a practical matter, not a theoretical matter. As some scholars of wishful thinking recognise, ‘voters are requested to cast ballots rather than make predictions’ (Babad and Yacobos, 1993: 38–39). Of course, voters are not therefore somehow exempt from the norms of theoretical reason. However, when thinking about the rationality of partisan electoral expectations, we should not jump to the conclusion that they are violating such norms without considering whether what they are doing might be rational from a practical standpoint.

Electoral Hope: A Practical Account

To act to produce an outcome, like a voter does, makes little sense if there is no hope of achieving that outcome. So to take any action towards producing an outcome is to act as if it is a real possibility – to hold out hope. If acting towards an outcome involves holding out hope that the outcome will prevail – that the party or candidate we vote for, or whose victory or other electoral goals we are otherwise disposed to act towards, will achieve those electoral goals – then those who vote for that party are surely more likely to say that there is indeed hope that it will win. ⁵ As this wording suggests, I contend that partisan electoral expectations may be understood in terms of a principle of hope: electoral hope. This concept tailors, to the electoral domain, the more general concept of hope, which is the subject of a large philosophical literature (e.g. Blöser and Stahl, 2017, 2020; Chignell, 2014, 2023; Goldman, 2023, 2024; Huber, 2023, 2024; Lacelle-Webster 2024; McGeer, 2004; Pettit, 2004). Broadly defined, hope involves ‘an affirmative attitude towards a future state of affairs that we take to be possible yet uncertain: we do not see the world as completely closed to the possibility of it being the way we would like it to be’ (Huber, 2021: 729). ⁶ Goldman (2023: 9) states that ‘hope has practically limitless imaginable objectives’, suggesting it can be adapted or circumscribed to those objectives – where ‘political hope concerns the exercise of public power, and democratic hope concerns the exercise of public power mutually orchestrated with others’, electoral hope focuses specifically on the electoral orchestration of such ‘public power’.

Consider a voter V who wants to vote for the party P because they like its policy offering. A friend asks them why they are voting for P and V says, ‘because I agree with P’s policies’. But V’s friend doesn’t really understand how electoral democracy works, and so asks, ‘but why does that mean you would vote for P?’ And so V, stating the obvious, responds, ‘because if I vote for P, it has a better chance of winning, and then enacting its policies, of course!’ But V’s friend is still confused, because this friend has heard that P isn’t doing as well as Q in the polls. What sense does it make to vote for a party in order to help it win if it’s not going to win? V might say, ‘I beg to differ, there is still hope!’, because V is holding onto a belief in the possibility that P will win that makes sense of what V is doing, which they believe is the right thing to do. Electoral hope is not what is motivating V to choose P over the other options, but it plays a key role in rationally justifying voting for P at all, given that V prefers it over the other options.

It is in this sense that electoral hope is a principle of voting, and an important one at that. A principle is just ‘a description of the mental act of taking certain considerations to count in favor of certain acts’ (Korsgaard, 2008: 228). ⁷ A principle says nothing about what specifically those motives or acts should be, just how that act relates to different considerations. For example, we could enact a principle of taking a party’s sound policy offering to count in favour of voting for it, by voting for a party that has a sound policy offering. But that principle cannot really stand alone. For a voter has to take these reasons why their party is the rightful victor to be reasons to vote for that party – reasons to contribute to that party winning the election. It doesn’t matter which policy package is best if the policies stand no chance of ever being implemented. So for that reason to make sense as a reason to vote for a party, another principle is needed: that deeming a future political outcome the right one is a reason to vote for that outcome, that is, taking it to be possible that the outcome will be realised. This is the principle of electoral hope.

To put this point another way, we can think of voting as an act done for the sake of some end. The act a voter does is to mark an X in a box on a piece of paper, or whatever procedural ritual is demanded of them by local electoral administration. This act is a means taken to promote the end of a particular political outcome. It is this combination of an act and an end, to which that act is the means, that makes up an action (Korsgaard, 2009: 11). Arguably, the constitutive aim of action is therefore that it ‘should have a point’ (Millar, 2009: 143; see also Velleman, 1996): that doing the act is intelligible in terms of the end. A vote to leave the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum was just that: a ballot cast by writing on a piece of paper (the act) as a means of promoting the outcome of terminating the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union (the end). Now suppose that end was impossible – there was no chance the United Kingdom would leave the European Union. Then, whatever reason the Brexit voter had for wanting to leave the European Union, they would essentially have been taking the means to nothing when voting. The action would not ‘have a point’. Or, rather than a coherent action, all we would be left with is the act. For what the Brexit voter did to make sense, whatever their reasons were for doing it, they needed to believe that it was possible the United Kingdom actually would withdraw from the European Union.

Or consider a case in which someone is asked to vote while already knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have lost. Such situations can arise when exit polls make it known, while voting is still open, which side has won (e.g. Morton et al., 2015). Sudman (1986: 332) imagines a Californian voter put off by such an announcement on a ‘rainy’ day with a ‘long line’ at the polling place: ‘she says why bother and turns her car around and drives home’. The point here is not that this imagined outcome is inevitable. Perhaps if the weather had been better this Californian would have voted regardless. But for doing so to make sense as a rational action, and particularly to make sense to this voter herself, she would need to see the act as promoting some end other than the outcome for which she seems to be voting. There are many such potential ends: limiting the size of the opponent’s majority, expressing herself, fulfilling a civic duty, and so forth. And of course, a voter who supports an outcome that does have a chance of winning might also vote for such other reasons. But crucially, that voter would not need to stipulate any of these other ends as a way of making sense of voting – voting to promote an outcome that stands a chance of winning already, inherently, makes rational sense as an action.

Across these examples, I am drawing on a prominent argument in the literature on hope, inspired by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant: that hope is justified as part of how people rationally act, through practical reason (Chignell, 2022; Goldman, 2023; Huber, 2023). ⁸ Unlike theoretical reason, the aim of practical reason is not knowledge (O’Neill, 1989: 77). It concerns, ‘in the first instance’ the making of ‘choices, plans, and intentions’ (Harman, 2004: 48; see also Broome, 2009: 63). Practical reason encompasses ‘the rationality of elements, such as actions, in virtue of which we are practical beings seeking to do things’ (Audi, 2004: 17). However, practical reason can still issue in the formation of beliefs. The ‘intention to do X’ rationally ‘requires at least the belief that it is possible that one do X’ (Wallace, 2006: 20). So it is natural, from the perspective of practical reason, to come to believe it is possible to obtain our objectives, committing us to believe in the ‘existence of any necessary means to the end’ (Chignell, 2022: 126) when we lack evidence for (and against) such a belief. In Kant’s (1998 [1781]: A823) terms, under practical reason, ‘taking something that is theoretically insufficient to be true [can] be called believing’. Such practical beliefs serve to ground hope:

whether we can attain an end we have set for ourselves depends not only on our own capacities . . . but also on certain background or environmental conditions. Practical [b]eliefs affirm that these conditions pertain, such that our efforts directed at the end are not in vain. By virtue of doing so, they have the non-epistemic merit of allowing us to pursue or even attain the relevant end . . . I may have to adopt a practical [b]elief that explicitly affirms that my efforts are not futile but instead coincide (in ways that may very well remain causally obscure to me) with the requisite external circumstances (Huber, 2018: 656).

Voters set themselves the end of, for example, electing a certain candidate or party to office, because they see this as the right outcome for certain – let’s assume, good – reasons. As argued above, the principle of electoral hope tells voters to take these reasons it is the right outcome to be reasons to vote for it, because it is possible it will prevail. This principle of hope involved in setting and pursuing an electoral end provides a practical, not theoretical or epistemic, reason to believe that the ‘background conditions’ or ‘external circumstances’ for the attainment of that electoral end obtain. ⁹ Someone might not hold explicit beliefs about what exactly these ‘conditions’ and ‘circumstances’ are – just that whatever they are, they hold. It is this practical belief that grounds electoral hope.

Importantly though, such practical beliefs remain theoretically ‘defeasible’: they can ‘be defeated by evidence, that, say, the causal pathway does not in fact exist’ (Chignell, 2022: 127). Although, at least on a Kantian account, practical reason takes precedence over theoretical reason (Williams, 1983: 37), this ‘primacy’ remains conditional: ‘propositions on which the interest of practical reason depends necessarily, so long as they are not contradicted by theoretical reason, must be accepted’ (Gardner, 2006: 260, emphasis added). By the same token then, ‘a particular hope should be given up if one should believe (on the basis of evidence) that its object is impossible’ (Blöser et al., 2020: 6; see also Miceli and Castelfranchi, 2010). For example, a voter holding out hope that Muhammad Ali would win the 2024 US presidential election would certainly have been irrational if they maintained this expectation upon learning that the late great Muhammad Ali was not in fact a candidate for the presidency – clear evidence that the ‘causal pathway’ to his election to the presidency does not exist. Indeed, practical belief in that causal pathway should be given up without any of the hesitation or resistance with which we might guard theoretical beliefs. For the practical beliefs underpinning electoral hope themselves have no theoretical grounding, and so can never be something people take themselves to know. As Huber (2018: 657) puts it, ‘we hold a practical [b]elief with the reflexive awareness that our objective knowledge of the world does not thereby increase’.

And here is the crux of the difference between the theoretical account of wishful thinking and the practical account of electoral hope. For wishful thinking, the trouble is precisely that voters do not allow their beliefs to be theoretically defeated: they form and maintain the belief that their side stands a chance by exploiting, misinterpreting, or ignoring the evidence. For electoral hope, it is not evidence that produces partisan electoral expectations, but the uncertainty that evidence can never fully resolve. Hope is ‘characterised by uncertainty’ (Goldman, 2023: 2) – a way of making sense of action towards an uncertain future, which the hopeful person recognises they cannot predict with certainty. It is that very uncertainty that gives voters reason both to act and to hold out hope in the possibility that the outcome towards which they act will prevail. That hope is not grounded in a biased processing of the relevant evidence, but in practical beliefs that recognise the impossibility of knowing in advance what will happen. It was not possible, for example, to use evidence to arrive at knowledge about who would win the 2024 US presidential election, nor to work out which parties would enter into government together following the 2025 German federal election, nor to assign a meaningful definitive likelihood to the Labour Party’s chance of securing a majority at the 2024 UK general election. These questions cannot be settled ahead of time. The point is not that in these particular cases the evidence was inconclusive, but that when it comes to predicting the future, there is always incalculable uncertainty. ¹⁰ Forecasts put Hillary Clinton’s chance of winning the 2016 US presidential election at 85%–99%. But those percentage probabilities were themselves uncertain – they do not quantify the uncertainty, but just reproduce the evidence on which they are based, derived from polls and modelling assumptions. ¹¹ So was a Republican voter forced by the standards of theoretical reason to predict Clinton would win? No, they were licensed by the standards of practical reason to believe it possible – correctly, as it turned out – that Donald Trump would win. (Or rather, they would have been, had it been practically rational to intend to vote for him and his anti-democratic agenda in the first place – a condition I discuss below.) But they did not, could not, have evidence that his victory was impossible. It wasn’t; he won. That doesn’t mean that all Republicans would have predicted Trump would win, but that it was likely more of them would predict that outcome – or assign it a higher chance of success when asked – than Democrats.

Now of course, while all election outcomes are uncertain, some are more uncertain than others. Partisan electoral expectations are likely to be most pronounced in situations of higher uncertainty – when polls are fluctuating, forecasts up in the air, and pundits in disagreement. Resolution of such uncertainty will cause partisans to converge towards closer agreement in their expectations. And indeed, recent research demonstrates that when uncertainty suddenly and dramatically reduces, so too does the gap in expectations across party groups, which is increasingly constrained by the bounds of uncertainty (Barnfield et al., 2025b).

Who Can Hope: Action and Identity

But notice that electoral hope is only justified along the lines I am proposing for someone who acts to produce the outcome they hope for. It is because rationally acting towards an outcome requires hope in the possibility that the outcome will obtain that such hope is justified by the standards of practical reason. So if you don’t act – usually, that means voting – you don’t have licence to hold out electoral hope. ¹² Indeed, Kant argued that ‘the hope to which humans are entitled within the limits of reason is grounded on the efficacy of their own action’ (Mittleman, 2009: 169), and ‘is permissible only . . . with activity towards aspirational ends’ (Goldman, 2024: 325). As Blöser (2024: 909) puts it, if ‘our actions are among the conditions for the realization of hope’ then ‘if we do not act to promote the fulfilment of our hope, hope cannot be realized . . . and is therefore irrational’. After all, roughly speaking, for Kant, a practical reasoner in a decision-making context should do what everyone could will to be done under their circumstances (O’Neill, 2004: 98), or to act on principles that could hold for everyone in a given situation (O’Neill, 1989: 59; see also Korsgaard, 1996a). A voter who seeks a particular election outcome but does not take action towards it, such as voting, is acting in a way that, if applied to all others, would certainly not produce their hoped-for outcome. So, only if we act in a way that is consistent with producing an outcome – if ‘man [sic] [gives] . . . to himself a relation to an end that can be sufficient for itself’ (Kant 2000 [1790]: 298) – can we be justified in hoping for that outcome. As Kant (1960 [1793]: 92) puts it elsewhere, ‘man [sic] must proceed as if everything depended upon him; only on this condition dare he hope that higher wisdom will grant the completion of his well-intentioned endeavours’. ¹³

On this view, those who hold out hope for election outcomes without acting towards them would be aptly described as ‘wishful’ (McGeer, 2004: 113) – agents who ‘fail to take the necessary steps on which the possibility of realising their ends depend[s]’ (Calhoun, 2018: 87). Rather than hope, such agents would be engaging in a baseless optimism (Eagleton, 2019). Such optimism risks blurring into a metaphysical faith in progress, acting not as if good outcomes are possible but as if future improvements are just the way of things, a property of the world itself (Goldman, 2024), in direct contradiction of a democratic ontology of an open future that is subject to our agency (White, 2024).

However, an alternative practical justification that does not privilege action so strongly is to consider that electoral hope might be fundamental to partisans. Blöser and Stahl (2017) argue that, in cases of ‘fundamental hope’, hope is justified because it is fundamental to, or constitutive of, someone’s practical identity. A practical identity is a conception of themselves under which people take considerations to be reasons to act and find those actions ‘to be worth undertaking’ – a ‘role with a point’ in which people adopt certain principles (Korsgaard, 2009: 20–21). Sometimes, hope forms part of such a practical identity, constituting someone as the kind of person they are, such that maintaining hope is necessary for their practical identity (Blöser and Stahl 2017: 355–356). For example, a political activist’s identity may require that they ‘[hope] for the end of global inequality in full knowledge of its unlikeliness’ (Blöser and Stahl 2017: 356). Being a spouse might require believing that the relationship will last (Callard, 2025: 68). Losing these hopes would erode the activist’s or spouse’s practical identity and call into question the principles that come with it. It would be less true for them that ‘certain considerations constitute reasons for them to act’ (Blöser and Stahl 2017: 357). If this argument is correct, then holding out hope may be justified not only directly by action, but also indirectly, through the need to maintain a practical identity that characteristically entails or provides reasons for action.

Partisanship is widely deemed, among political scientists, to be an important and stable part of people’s identities (Green et al., 2002; Huddy et al., 2015). Maintaining hope that the party with which one identifies can achieve its electoral objectives might be constitutive of such a practical identity (Barnfield and Johns, 2025: 4). A Labour partisan who is resigned to the fate of always losing to the Conservatives ceases to identify as the kind of person who sees the possibility of Labour’s electoral victory as a reason to act towards that electoral victory (see Stahl, 2024: 967). Although ultimately this justification still relies on hope’s involvement in having reasons to act, maintaining and constituting a practical identity arguably gives rise to an ongoing need to sustain electoral hope, even at times when action is not possible. For example, being a CDU supporter may justify maintaining the belief, after the election result is known, that it is possible that the CDU will end up in the German governing coalition, even though the supporter can no longer vote for the outcome (e.g. Barnfield et al., 2025b). Maintaining that belief contributes to constituting them as a CDU supporter who will tend to act towards the CDU’s electoral success on future occasions when they are not powerless to do so.

What Can Be Hoped for: Politics and Morality

However, even if electoral hope is underpinned by action or practical identity, that hope can still fail to be rational and normatively justified, when the action itself – or the practical identity inclining towards certain action – is not practically rational or morally sound. In such cases, the action of voting fails to justify holding out electoral hope, because the action itself is not justifiable. Similarly, a voter’s practical identity of partisanship fails to justify electoral hope unless it ‘propels them to effectively pursue politically worthwhile causes’ (Howard, 2024: 939). Indeed, on a strict Kantian account, the action that justifies hope must be one that is not only morally permissible, but morally required – it must be something the agent has a moral duty to do (Huber, 2018: 657–658). In the case of electoral hope, this would mean that voters are only licensed to hold out hope for election outcomes they are morally required to, and therefore do, vote for.

Now this is a very demanding standard. And of course, it is not one we can usually confidently apply third-personally – who’s to say what voters are morally required to vote for, or whether voting is ever morally required? But given the scale of the stakes at play in elections, it is reasonable to assume that if an outcome is the right one to vote for, then we are morally required to vote for it, or at least that it will honestly seem to us that we are. So as long as voters are really trying to work out what is the right outcome to vote for, and being practically rational in doing so, then from a first-person perspective they are meeting the standard of moral requirement – absent an explanation of why, in fact, they are not morally required to pursue it.

Of course, voters’ judgements of what election outcomes they should pursue can be wrong, even from their own perspective. Upon realising that, they should not hope for those outcomes, because they should not vote for them – they are false hopes. In this sense, hope is not only theoretically defeasible but also practically defeasible. Practical reason is not only about rationally deciding how to act given our preferences, as if the ends are fixed and we must choose the means; it is also about rationally choosing those ends, which involves moral judgement (O’Neill, 1989: 73–74). ¹⁴ When practical reason about what it is right to do reveals to a voter, who feels morally required to vote for the right outcome, that an electoral end is a false hope, they will no longer pursue it, and therefore no longer (have reason to) hope for it. Electoral hope remains open to reassessment via our reflections about how we should vote – about what is demanded of us in our political moment. Similarly, if underpinned by practical identities such as partisanship, the ‘normative evaluation’ of electoral hope concerns ‘the moral value of our practical identities’ and therefore ‘can change as we better understand what our practical identity entails’ and we ‘gain reasons to give up’ our electoral hope for a particular outcome (Howard, 2024: 941; see also Stahl, 2024: 961). As it dawns on a student during their time at university that their Conservative upbringing does not orientate them towards moral political ends, they lose their reason to identify as a Conservative, and – partly as a result – lose any reason to hold out hope for Conservative election victories. Whether they are right in this re-evaluation is not something we can realistically settle in general, but as long as the student is trying to settle it rationally, they are licensed to hold out electoral hope. ¹⁵

Nonetheless, circumstances can arise in which it is clear, even from a third-person perspective, that such hope is misguided because it is distorted by elites. Drahos (2004: 36) raises the concern that political actors may ‘trade in’ what he calls ‘public hope’ – rhetorical articulations of hope that are attempts to ‘give’ people hope, by harnessing ‘collectivities to economic and social agendas that are . . . ultimately destructive of the social institutions upon which actual private and collective hopes depend’. Public hope, in other words, can give rise to what Stahl (2024: 953) calls ‘ideological hopes’ which ‘serve as conduits of particular types of social power that contribute to ensuring the social subordination of those who entertain them’. Such concerns naturally arise in cases where voters are encouraged to pursue and hope for election outcomes that may contribute to the erosion of democracy itself. Voters thereby end up hoping for outcomes that deny them the conditions necessary to be autonomous, efficacious, practically rational political decision-makers in the first place. Recent instances of leaders with fundamentally anti-democratic political agendas (as alluded to earlier) coming to power by securing the support, and harnessing the hopes, of voters – voters who otherwise endorse democratic principles (Graham and Svolik, 2020) – demonstrate the power of ‘public’ electoral hope to spur ‘ideological’ electoral hope. Continued careful scrutiny of the perverting power of public and ideological hope would be of great value in enabling electoral hope to remain the practically rational principle of democratic politics that I have argued it can be.

Conclusion

In one of political science’s earliest treatments of partisan electoral expectations, voters were condemned, in grand terms, for holding them:

The men [sic] who believe they are whipped are almost sure to be beaten, but the men who never say die sometimes turn the tide in their own favour. But this will to do, however necessary it may be to buoy up the spirit of political campaigners, inhibits cerebration on the true status of the candidate and his party with the citizens who cast the votes. It opens the door to delusions of grandeur and power, and causes otherwise normal men to see great and sweeping victories where fate holds crushing defeat in store (Robinson, 1932: 10).

While expectations of electoral victory are practically necessary for political campaigners, supporters of those same campaigns – if they are to be considered ‘normal men’ without ‘delusions of grandeur’ – are only allowed to ponder the ‘true status’ of their chances. But success in an electoral democracy relies on the actions of both groups: campaigners and the voters they are trying to convince. So why aren’t voters justified in holding out hope too?

In this article, I have made the case that voters’ partisan electoral expectations are rationally justifiable, following a principle of electoral hope. This argument reinforces the idea that one of political science’s perennial findings is indeed, as was argued as early as the 1930s, a ‘very real phenomenon of political life’ (Hayes, 1932: 190), and should therefore interest scholars of political studies broadly defined. But the reason partisan electoral expectations are such an important political phenomenon in democracies is not that they demonstrate some kind of widespread irrationality around elections, as has long been assumed. Partisan electoral expectations are significant because they show us how citizens make rational sense of their role in democracies: of voting for, promoting, or constituting their identity as people inclined to act towards, certain election outcomes. This is not to suggest that electoral hope is the only, or always the best, way to square this circle. But the structure of voting as an action means that for most voters, holding the practical belief that the outcome they support stands a chance of winning is an obvious default way to rationally justify their electoral choices. Therefore, the normative proscription of partisan electoral expectations makes little sense. In presenting this argument, complicating the implicit consensus of over 80 years of scholarship, I have filled a recently identified void of ‘theoretical innovations’ and ‘dramatic debates’ in wishful thinking research (Tikochinski and Babad, 2022: 252).

Indeed, this intervention provides an entirely new perspective on recent findings in that literature – helping to resolve puzzles those findings present, and opening new lines of enquiry. For example, moving away from the idea that people theoretically irrationally misinterpret information helps solve the puzzle of why partisans update their expectations to roughly equal degrees and in the same direction when presented with information such as election forecasts (Barnfield et al., 2025a). Relatedly, as mentioned earlier, electoral hope, with its emphasis on uncertainty, also predicts the recent finding that expectations of government formation ‘converge’ across party lines when uncertainty reduces – a finding that directly contradicts dynamic accounts of wishful thinking (Barnfield et al., 2025b). However, this role of uncertainty also raises the question of whether partisan electoral expectations could be especially pronounced in highly polarised contexts, where not only are election outcomes likely to be more uncertain but also people’s convictions about what is politically and morally required of them as voters are likely to be strong. Finally, electoral hope also aligns with recent work suggesting so-called wishful thinking is strongly driven by voters who score high in the psychological trait of ‘hope’ – a tendency to envisage and pursue pathways to one’s goals – rather than ‘optimism’ – a tendency to expect things to turn out well, come what may (Barnfield and Johns, 2025). But given that action is central both to this psychological trait of hope and to the account of electoral hope presented here, the question also arises of whether people hold out hope for the electoral success of any party or candidate they vote for, even when casting a strategic vote, or only the party or candidate to whose success that vote is supposed to contribute.

In addition to resolving some puzzles and posing new ones, electoral hope also suggests a shift in this literature’s focus away from normative concern about the theoretical irrationality. The benefits of this shift include no longer fruitlessly criticising voters for something that appears to be an all but universal feature of political psychology, and no longer spending resources seeking elusive ways to override this tendency. Indeed, even if such efforts are motivated not by concerns about irrationality, but about the downstream consequences of partisan electoral expectations, electoral hope again suggests pause for thought. For example, insofar as someone’s (partisan) electoral expectations are supported by theoretically defeasible practical beliefs which they hold in full awareness that they do not constitute knowledge, it is unlikely that they will lose faith in democracy just because an election outcome contradicts those expectations. Instead, they would have definitive evidence that the practical belief grounding their hope was false, and duly – albeit disappointedly – cease to hold it to be true. Similarly, from the practical perspective of electoral hope, the concern that partisan electoral expectations will affect how people vote confuses the order of things. It is not (or not primarily) because a voter holds out hope that an outcome will prevail that they vote (or fail to vote) for it; it is primarily because a voter is inclined to vote a certain way that they can, and often do, hold out hope that an outcome will prevail.

Yet, electoral hope is not always legitimate, and obviously comes with potential pitfalls of its own. As I have noted, electoral hope is only justified for people who take action towards the electoral outcomes they hope for, and in doing so, are trying to do what is politically and morally required. These judgements can be distorted and perverted by pernicious political actors, harnessing hope to pursue their own, ultimately anti-democratic, ends. Indeed, such actors might also persuade voters not to abandon their practical belief following an election defeat – blaming the loss on, say, electoral fraud, and encouraging their voters not to accept its legitimacy. Insofar as normative concerns should set our research agenda, political science would do well to (continue to) shed light on how such forces can distort and erode the role of hope in democracy.

The concept of hope in general would be a valuable addition to how we theorise about democratic action in political science. Electoral hope shows one way that applying this concept can help us think differently about perennial political scientific findings. Thinking more broadly about how hope, as a principle of political action, helps people make sense of what they are doing as democratic agents in electoral democracies will enrich our understanding of those elections and of democratic agency.