Research

Working Papers

Blinded by Out-group Hatred. Why does Radical Right Party Entry Reduce its Voters’ Satisfaction with Democracy?

With Morgan Le Corre Juratic.

Read more This paper examines why the electoral breakthrough of radical parties further reinforces democratic dissatisfaction among their voters. Against the prevailing utilitarian framework, we argue that an affective response to the out-group instead of the in-group party results better explains changes in democratic evaluations under growing affective polarization. To evaluate our theory, we combine observational, experimental and qualitative evidence from a sample of Éric Zemmour voters, the emerging radical right candidate who disrupted the 2022 French elections. Our findings confirm that Zemmour voters became the least satisfied with democracy after the elections and provide evidence of a negative affective response to the out-group (Macron) win as the driving mechanism. The qualitative analysis confirms the causal path from negative feelings toward the winner to questioning the democratic system. Contrary to representation theories, our paper suggests that the institutional inclusion of marginalized political groups may only exacerbate dissatisfaction in highly polarized electoral contexts.

The preprint is available here.

Boost or Backlash? The Heterogeneous Effects of Parliamentary Representation on Satisfaction with Democracy

Read more Does parliamentary representation affect satisfaction with democracy (SWD)? This question is ever more pressing given the central role of parliaments in liberal democracies and their increasing fragmentation in the West. Nonetheless, while extensive evidence confirms that winning an election increases SWD, whether obtaining parliamentary representation matters for voters' democratic evaluations remains unclear. This paper departs from the expectation that having parliamentary representation will boost SWD. However, it may have unintended consequences that cause a backlash among dissatisfied voters. Specifically, it is theorized that anti-establishment radical party voters will experience an SWD decrease because obtaining representation will increase the saliency of the establishment win. Two studies test these expectations. The first one leverages the as-if-random seats' assignment around legally fixed electoral thresholds to identify the effect of parliamentary representation on SWD with a regression-discontinuity design (RDD). Consistent with the theory, the RDD identifies an average (non-significant) positive effect of parliamentary representation that becomes (significant) negative and substantially large for radical party voters. The second study focuses on the case of the radical party AfD after entering the *Bundestag* in the 2017 German Federal election. It uses a panel survey's pre and post-electoral waves to confirm that AfD voters become less satisfied with democracy after the election. Furthermore, it shows that the negative change is driven by AfD voters with strong anti-establishment attitudes, in line with the hypothesized mechanism. These findings pose concerning implications for theories of representation and democratic legitimacy. For most voters, the promise of representation barely enhances their system evaluations. For those more alienated, it even backlashes and worsens them.

Draft available upon request.

Does New Party Entry Increase Electoral Turnout? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the 2015 Spanish Local Elections

Read more The hypothesis that a larger number of parties boosts electoral participation is well-established in political research. However, the most up-to-date evidence fails to identify a causal effect. Employing time-series cross-sectional data, some studies show that electoral turnout is higher when increasing the number of available candidates, while others justify the opposite, i.e., that anticipating higher turnout rates incentivizes new parties to compete. To solve this endogeneity puzzle, I leverage a unique real-world setting with quasi-exogeneous variation in the number of new parties' candidate lists: the 2015 Spanish local elections. In those elections, the two newcomers *Podemos* and *Ciudadanos* run candidates in as many municipalities as possible to jump on the bandwagon of their recent success at the European Parliamentary elections. However, they could not do it in many of them due to their lack of organizational roots. Therefore, I compare official participation records across these municipalities to identify the effect of new parties' candidates on turnout by matching them on a series of observable characteristics with a difference-in-differences approach. The results provide a causal estimate of the effect of new parties' candidate lists close to a 0.8% average increase on electoral turnout, robust to different specifications. This finding advises against using electoral participation rates as an explanatory variable for studies of new party entry, while it confirms previous correlational evidence on party entry effects. More broadly, it contributes to the growing literature on the effects of party system change on political behaviour. From a normative perspective, it also defies the folk wisdom that increasing party system fragmentation has adverse consequences for democratic quality.

Draft available upon request.

Disruptive Elections and their Implications for Satisfaction with Democracy

Read more Elections that break regular volatility patterns because of massive vote transfers to challenger parties are increasingly common in Western democracies. Yet, we lack an analytical framework to identify their causes and consequences. This paper introduces the concept of disruptive elections to address this gap and provides evidence of its utility by analyzing their implications on a well-studied post-electoral outcome: satisfaction with democracy (SWD). The paper proceeds in two steps. First, it defines, operationalizes and maps all the disruptive elections that have shaken Western European party systems from 1945 until 2021. Second, it uses panel data from five national elections in Europe to show that voters do not experience changes in SWD after disruptive elections, in contrast to after regular elections. When challenger parties break into the system without winning, the resulting uncertainty blurs the winner-loser distinction, and the typical winner-loser gap in SWD fades away. The contribution of this study is twofold. First, it provides an original framework for studying elections that break with predictable electoral competition patterns. Second, it provides evidence that disruptive elections negatively affect democratic legitimacy. At least in the short run, the post-disruption uncertainty hinders SWD changes among winners and losers alike.

Draft available upon request.

Work-In-Progress

The Politicization of Digitalization: How Political Parties Structure Nascent Conflicts over Digitalization Issues

With Mathilde M. van Ditmars and Alexander H. Trechsel.

Read more The ongoing digital revolution causes significant societal transformations with far-reaching and potentially disruptive consequences for citizens and society at large. However, political parties have been reluctant to campaign on digitalization-related issues, and their degree of politicization has so far remained rather low despite their serious conflict potential . To explain this puzzle, this paper argues that the emerging digital divide cross-cuts existing cleavages, so it is likely to be increasingly politicized at least as much within as between political parties. To this purpose, politicization is conceived as a two-fold process. A new set of issues gets politicized when it occupies a visible position in the political agenda (i.e., salience component), and either parties or intra-party factions adopt opposing views on it (i.e., conflict component). In this article we study the case of Switzerland – a country with one of the highest internet penetration rates in the world, that has already confronted digitalization-related affairs in multiple direct-democratic popular votes. We apply topic models to a corpus of parliamentary affairs and debates from 2000 to 2022 to analyze the salience and conflict of digitalization issues over time – both within and between Swiss political parties. Overall, this paper sets the basis for comprehending how inter- and intra-party competition patterns may reflect ever more consequential rapid digital advances in the near future. More generally, it contributes to understanding how parties deal with the politicization of new issues when nascent political conflicts arise both between and within political parties.

Can Parties Mobilize Voters over Digitalization Issues? A Field Experiment with a Voting Advice Application

With Mathilde M. van Ditmars and Alexander H. Trechsel.

Read more The study consists of an experiment that manipulates the visibility of digitalization as a political issue by introducing variation in the content of Voting Advice Application (VAA). It will be conducted in Switzerland within the framework of a two-wave panel survey fielded around the Swiss Federal elections held on 22 October 2023. The first wave of the survey will be fielded before the election. During this wave, the respondents will be randomly assigned to different versions of an embedded VAA that differ in the number of statements regarding digitalization issues. The second wave will be fielded shortly after the election and will measure self-reported vote choice and political preferences.

The political conflict potential of digitalization

With Mathilde M. van Ditmars and Alexander H. Trechsel.

Read more Does digitalization-induced societal change provide a social basis for a nascent political conflict? Grounded in cleavage theory, we study to what extent there is fertile breeding ground among citizens for a nascent political conflict caused by the digital revolution, with potential for further politicization. We argue that digitalization reinforces existing inequalities through non-equal distributions of digital skills and workplace automation risk that align with predispositions towards digitalization, resulting in winners and losers of digitalization. Consequentially, we expect this to strengthen self-perceptions and identifications of being on either side of this divide, with potential for politicization. Analysing survey data and focus groups in Switzerland, we show that citizens express concerns about the digital society and their digital skills level both for work and private life, that align with existing inequalities. These attitudes do not seem to lead to a strong identification with either side of the digitalization divide. The social basis of this potential political conflict is thus not expressed through dense social groups, which is in line with neo-cleavage theory (Hooghe & Marks, 2018). We conclude that even in absence of self-identification as “winners” or “losers” of digitalization, the perceived high salience of and citizens’ lived experiences with digitalization-induced change could provide a sufficient basis for politicization of this topic and subsequent mobilization on such issues by political actors.

Research Projects (as PI)

The downstream effect of a disliked candidate winning elections on democratic attitudes

With Morgan Le Corre Juratic.

Read more This project aims to causally assess the downstream effects of growing affective polarization among the electorate on satisfaction with democracy and other democratic outcomes (i.e. government’s legitimacy, perceptions of electoral fairness, violations of democratic principles). This project is an extension of a co-authored study (preprint submitted to a top journal) and will complement a preliminary and new empirical analysis with observational data and a Regression Discontinuity Design. In this analysis, we find that voters become less satisfied with democracy when their most hated party (compared to the better-liked, first “losing” party) barely wins most seats in parliament. Importantly, we find that this effect is not concentrated among radical voters or supporters of the main opposition party, but across all voters disliking the winner of elections. However, this study suffers from post-treatment bias, as the feelings toward each party used as an indicator are measured post-election (and correlate with vote choice). In addition, the range of dependent variables is limited to satisfaction with democracy, which constrains the interpretation of the findings. Hence, this project aims to complement this analysis with a survey experiment to address these concerns and increase the chances of this study being published in a top outlet. The experiment will manipulate in a hypothetical scenario whether respondents’ most disliked party wins elections in two countries and evaluate its effect on democratic satisfaction and other democratic outcomes. As affective polarization is growing in established democracies, the victory of a disliked party is a likely and common outcome of elections. Thus, assessing the downstream effects of this phenomenon on voters’ democratic support is critical to understanding the challenges posed by growing affective polarization in our democracies.

The spillover effects of center-periphery dynamics on politically disenfranchised regions

With Alberto López-Ortega and Javier Padilla.

Read more In the last decades, conflict over sovereignty and political autonomy has been ubiquitous in Europe, ranging from Catalonia and Spain to Scotland and the United Kingdom, and even extending to the latter and the European Union. Most studies on how center and peripheral regions interact in (quasi)federal states assume a bilateral framework in which the only actors involved are the region demanding devolution and the central government. In this project, we introduce an augmented model of center-periphery dynamics that includes disenfranchised regions, that is, regions not directly involved in the conflict whose demands for (de)centralization are not politically articulated and may vary as a reaction. From a public opinion perspective, we argue that identities in these regions will be influenced by demands for special treatment and the state's answers to these demands. We theorize that providing special treatment can bolster regional identity in disenfranchised areas. In contrast, conflictual negotiations over devolution will increase national identity and, in both cases, this will result in demands for symmetrical decentralization. We propose a multi-arm video-vignette experiment in Spain with a special focus on Andalusia, a prototypical disenfranchised region relative to the Spanish-Catalan conflict. Our experiment is particularly well-suited to the Spanish political scenario, where current negotiations for government formation have reinvigorated the territorial conflict over political autonomy in Catalonia. The results of this project have far-reaching implications beyond the Spanish case. The reactions of the disenfranchised regions are important to understand the constraints faced by the different actors in asymmetric federalist states. Moreover, these negotiations may explain why regional identities might be more prominent in the disenfranchised regions of asymmetric federalist countries than in the disenfranchised regions of centralized countries. This research significantly advances our understanding of state stability by providing a nuanced perspective on regional interactions and identities.

Fragmented Party Offer, Vote Choice and Attitude Change: a Study on Right-wing Voters in the 2022 French Presidential Elections

With Morgan Le Corre Juratic.

Read more Over the last two decades, party system fragmentation has dramatically increased in Western democracies (Chiaramonte & Emanuele, 2019; Emanuele & Chiaramonte, 2018, 2019). This change has not come alone. On the contrary, polarization and dissatisfaction with the democratic process are arguably on the rise too (Boxell et al., 2020; Martini & Quaranta, 2020). This project links both phenomena by analyzing the attitudinal correlates of new party voting and the effect of electoral results on attitude change when a new party enters. To do so, it leverages the unique context of the 2022 French presidential election, where a new far-right challenger (the novel candidate Éric Zemmour) is likely to obtain sizeable electoral support. The study consists of a two-wave panel survey distributed through Facebook targeted ads among potential right-wing voters before and after the 1st round of the election. Its goal is two-fold. First, the pre-electoral wave aims to disentangle the correlates of new party voting when more than one viable option is available within the same ideological space. Second, the post-electoral wave allows us to analyse pre-post election attitude change. An additional survey experiment assesses the effect of electoral information frames on satisfaction with democracy (SWD), political trust and efficacy among new party supporters.

The pre-analysis plan is pre-registered in EGAP. You can download it here.

PhD Dissertation (June 2023)

New Party Entry and Political Engagement: Electoral Turnout and Satisfaction with Democracy

Read more The last two decades have seen a surge in the institutionalization of new political parties, yet low levels of political engagement are persistent in many Western democracies. This raises questions about whether new parties can effectively channel political discontent and promote participation. This thesis argues that new party entry has distinct implications for different forms of political engagement. While new parties can increase electoral participation, they can also reinforce democratic dissatisfaction in affectively polarized environments. The empirical chapters provide evidence to support these arguments. Chapter 2 demonstrates that obtaining parliamentary representation does not significantly increase satisfaction with democracy and even reinforces political discontent among anti-establishment radical party voters. Chapter 3 introduces the concept of disruptive elections and shows that rapid electoral shifts can hinder changes in democratic satisfaction by introducing uncertainty into the government formation process. Chapter 4 proposes that considering an in-group/out-group logic is critical to understanding post-electoral changes in satisfaction with democracy among affectively polarized voters. It provides evidence that the establishment party win fosters political discontent among radical party voters despite electoral success. Finally, chapter 5 offers causal evidence that new party entry increases electoral turnout. These findings contribute to the growing literature on the effects of electoral change on political attitudes and behavior and highlight concerning implications for normative democratic theory. While new political parties may bring new forms of engagement, they can also exacerbate polarizing competition patterns that put democracy at risk. Ultimately, their impact depends on the specific conditions that led to their entry, urging us to consider ways to incorporate new political demands while reducing partisan animosity.

The dissertation is published in open-access and you can download it here.