Abstract
The classic heuristics of voting behaviour have been eroded overtime especially in well-established democracies. Ideology, party identification, and social class have been gradually replaced by short-period factors. In particular, the personalization has represented an innovative variable that significantly contributes to explain voting behaviour. Cross-pressures between party identification, candidate assessments and issue preferences paved the way to the diffusion of protest voting, both against the élite and the system. In this respect, Italy represents a very interesting case from both a theoretical and an empirical point view considering the presence of protest parties and the important diffusion of anti-system movements which surfed the protest to consolidate their positions. The editors conceived this special issue aiming at analysing and measuring the impact of protest/negative voting in Italy between 2016 and 2020, a period in which protest parties and voters’ discontent have significantly increased. Data presented by the different papers confirm, albeit under different perspectives, the relevance of this peculiar form of political behaviour.
Highlights
Taking stock of the existing empirical literature, we follow Garzia and Ferreira da Silva (2021b, 2) and summarize the tendency towards negative voting as driven by three micro-behavioural components, “namely: (1) an instrumental-rational component characterized by retrospective performance evaluations and rationalization mechanisms; (2) an ideological component grounded on long-lasting political identities; and (3) an affective component, motivated by attitudes towards parties and candidates”
The electoral performance of these parties tests the importance of Italy in dealing with the analysis of the protest voting, as well as their relevance in disentangling conceptual aspects of the negative vote in general
The empirical analysis reported in this special issue clearly support the relevance of the increasing presence of the negative voting as a factor explaining voting behaviour in the Italian context
Summary
Taking stock of the existing empirical literature, we follow Garzia and Ferreira da Silva (2021b, 2) and summarize the tendency towards negative voting as driven by three micro-behavioural components, “namely: (1) an instrumental-rational component characterized by retrospective performance evaluations and rationalization mechanisms; (2) an ideological component grounded on long-lasting political identities; and (3) an affective component, motivated by (negative) attitudes towards parties and candidates”. Does represent a relevant case of success of populist parties, which collected many protest votes thank to electoral campaigned based on the emphasis on the reject of all the existent and established ruling class (Bergman and Passarelli 2016; Bergman et al 2021).
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