'Voting Against?' On The Psychological Bases of Protest Voting in Europe

The poor health of citizens’ relations with their democracies is a long debated topic in the field of social and political sciences (e.g. di Palma 1970; Montero and Torcal 2006). However, to say it in Hirschman's terms (1970), people’s discontent towards their authorities does not necessarily lead to an exit from the political life, but also to a possible voice strategy, i.e. the adoption of new and specific patterns of political action. Casting a protest vote would be among these possibilities. So far the effectiveness of this kind of electoral behavior has been often inferred by its alleged consequences at the macro level, such as electoral earthquakes and shocks in the morphology of the existing party systems. Nevertheless, it is not sure whether these contextual dynamics completely coincide to protest voting, i.e. casting a vote with the only aim to frighten and to punish the political system and/or èlite (Van der Eijk et al.1996; Van der Brug et al. 2000). Several scholars have tried to deal with this topic in the past, but a unified analytical framework still lacks in this field (Van der Brug and Fennema 2003). In particular, the attitudinal dimensions at the base of protest voting have been so far only partially explored. In this paper I assume protest voting to be structured by two underlying components. The first one is political discontent, i.e. people’s dissatisfaction about day-to-day actions of political leaders and in particular the operation of governmental parties (e.g. Anderson, Blais, Bowler, Donovan and Listhaug 2007; Curini, Jou and Memoli 2012). The second one is political disaffection, that is a more general feeling of estrangement from politics, due to a lack of transparency and fairness of institutional processes and outputs (e.g. di Palma 1970; Montero and Torcal 2006; Dahlberg and Holmberg 2013). Specifically, I expect these two psychological components to be increasingly inter-connected over time, and to significantly affect vote choice, especially when it comes to anti-political-establishment parties (e.g. Schedler 1996). Within this framework, policy and ideological considerations should be overall of minor importance. The present hypotheses will be tested through several multi-level regression models on EU-wide data from the European Elections Studies (EES) over a considerable time span (1989-2014). Further tests will be also realized by multi-level structural equation modeling (ML-SEM), in order to clearly disentangle the causal effects of the two components on voting behavior - net of policy and ideological preferences - over time (e.g. Mehta and Neale 2005).