Is There Actually a 'Protest Vote' in People's Minds? Protest Motivations in European Voters' Reasoning in the 2014 European Parliament Elections
(2021) Annual Meeting of the Mid-West Political Science Conference (MPSA) (14.April.2021)
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- Often the existence of a protest vote is inferred from specific information at the aggregate level, such as election results favoring a party, or a candidate, generally recognized as a protest actor in public debate. Yet sudden increases in the electoral outcomes of these parties or candidates are not necessarily related to an underlying intention to protest. Indeed, one could well contribute to their success also because of many other reasons, including liking their policy platform and/or feeling psychologically close to them. Several scholars have tried to deal with this issue in the past. Nevertheless, a comprehensive and cross-country analysis of the role of protest motivations in electoral processes is still lacking in empirical research. Against this background, the present contribution aims at making a comprehensive EU-wide assessment of whether and how protest considerations actually affect the individual calculus of voting and what party competition dynamics (if any) trigger them in voters' minds. Analyses rely on a series of multi-level regressions on the most recent release of the European Election Voter Study (EES 2019), reshaped in the so-called stacked form and with voters’ propensities-to-vote for the main national parties (PTVs) used as dependent variable.
- Affiliations
Citations
Camatarri, S. (2021). Is There Actually a ‘Protest Vote’ in People’s Minds? Protest Motivations in European Voters’ Reasoning in the 2014 European Parliament Elections. Annual Meeting of the Mid-West Political Science Conference (MPSA). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/237294