The media have some leeway in portraying some political parties as winners and others as losers when reporting about election outcomes. This may be consequential for the public legitimacy of the resulting government. This paper therefore asks to what extent and how media framing of election results influences whether parties are perceived as legitimate government parties. We pre-registered several hypotheses expecting that voter exposure to predominantly positive (negative) frames of a party’s election result in media coverage will increase (decrease) the party’s perceived legitimacy as a government party and that this effect is mediated by the extent to which voters perceive the party as election winner (loser) following media reporting of election results. To test our pre-registered hypotheses, we use panel survey data from the 2021 German Federal Election and the 2023 Dutch parliamentary election. The dependent variable measures post-election whether respondents believe a party should be represented in the next government. Our mediator measures the extent to which a party has won or lost the preceding election in the respondents’ eyes. We link both surveys to content analyses of election news reporting to calculate exposure to positive (negative) frames of a party’s election result. First results suggest that while there are hardly any direct effects, media framing affects party legitimacy perceptions indirectly via winner/loser perceptions. They thereby lend partial support to our hypotheses and have important implications for research on election fairness and losers’ consent following democratic elections.