Garzia Diego
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Projets
Projets FNS
The rise of negative voting
2020 - 2024 (60 mois)
Requérant·e: Diego Garzia
Autres collaborateurs-trices: Frederico Ferreira Da Silva
Comparative analyses describe a long-term trend showing increasing distrust in political parties and party leaders across the Western world. This appears to be driven by the voters' tendency to emotionally distance themselves from the party they support while increasingly disliking parties and candidates they do not support. Early literature repeatedly referred to negativity biases in voters' choice-voters can cast a ballot "against" rather than "for" candidates. However, this claim has only very seldom been tested empirically outside the United States. This project's major aim is to offer a comprehensive (comparative and longitudinal) assessment of the drivers of negative voting, its impact on individual-level patterns of electoral behavior, and consider about the possible implications for democratic politics.
The theoretical framework departs from the intuition that an increasingly confrontational style of campaigning and political communication-and the rise of negative identifications in a context of partisan dealignment and strong political personalization-could all be driving a distinctive form of negatively-driven voting behavior. Three broad research questions emerge in this context: What are the drivers of negativity in voters' attitudes toward parties and party leaders? What are the effects of negativity on patterns of electoral participation and party choice? Has the impact of negativity on voting behavior increased across time?
