Dissertation Title: Voting Against? Toward a Comprehensive Framework for The Assessment of Protest Voting in Europe
Abstract: Often the effectiveness of an electoral protest is inferred by specific dynamics at the macro level, such as the occurrence electoral earthquakes and/or shocks in the morphology of the existing party systems. This was true, for example, in the first 2000s, when a substantive growth of radical right parties in Europe was interpreted by some as the expression of increasing political alienation and unease within specific sectors of society. The same applies to the recent rise of new and/or eurosceptic parties, described by some as the outcome of citizens’ reaction to the bad performances of their political systems and élites under the economic crisis. Yet sudden increases in the electoral outcomes of these parties are not necessarily related to an underlying intention to protest. Indeed, one could well contribute to their success because (s)he likes their policy platform or because feels ideologically and/or psychologically closed to them. However, this would scarcely fit to protest voting as it is usually intended in the literature, i.e. casting a vote with the main aim to frighten or punish the whole political system and/or an élite. Several scholars have tried to deal with this topic in the past. Nevertheless, their analyses have been mainly aimed at assessing whether voting for a specific party - or type of party - was characterized by a protest motivation or not. Thus, a comprehensive and cross-country analysis of the role of protest motivations in electoral processes still lacks in empirical research. This is exactly what my PhD dissertation is intended to deal with. Indeed, once reworked the existing literature in this field, it makes a EU-wide assessment of how protest considerations affect both the structure of individual choice, i.e. the calculus of voting, and the overall outcomes of an election.
The first element, in particular, is analyzed by means of a series of multi-level regressions on data from the 2014 European Election Voter Study (EES), reshaped in the so-called stacked form. The second, on the other hand, is assessed on the base of several counterfactual models at the national level, in which voters’ expected preferences for each party are estimated under various scenarios in which everything is the same except for the relevance of protest motivations in voters’ decision-making.
Research interests: Comparative study of representation, political behavior and political culture, cognitive politics, experimental political science
Graduated from: University of Milano
Degrees obtained: Bachelor's Degree in Political Sciences; Two-Year Master's Degree in Social Sciences for Research and Institutions
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