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Negative personalization and voting behavior in 14 parliamentary democracies, 1961-2018
[journal article]
Abstract Existing research has begun to tackle the electoral consequences of affective polarization through the lens of negative partisanship. However, not equal attention has been paid to voters’ polarized opinions toward political leaders and their impact on electoral behavior. This paper offers a comparat... view more
Existing research has begun to tackle the electoral consequences of affective polarization through the lens of negative partisanship. However, not equal attention has been paid to voters’ polarized opinions toward political leaders and their impact on electoral behavior. This paper offers a comparative, longitudinal assessment of the relationship between negativity towards party leaders and vote choice in multi-party systems. We develop our negative personalization hypothesis and test it empirically on an original pooled dataset featuring 109 national election surveys from 14 Western European parliamentary democracies collected over the last six decades. Our findings confirm the existence of a robust relationship between negative party-leader evaluations and vote choice. Furthermore, the results demonstrate a sizable growth in the incidence of negative personalization across time, now of a magnitude that compares to that exerted by in-party-leader evaluations. This finding constitutes a central innovation adding to the personalization of politics literature.... view less
Keywords
voting behavior; personalization; democracy; political behavior; change of government; multi-party system
Classification
Political Process, Elections, Political Sociology, Political Culture
Free Keywords
comparative political behavior; electoral change; leader effects; personalization of politics; negative voting; GLES
Document language
English
Publication Year
2021
Page/Pages
p. 1-11
Journal
Electoral Studies, 71 (2021)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2021.102300
ISSN
0261-3794
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed
Licence
Creative Commons - Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0