Negative Partisanship and Voting Behavior in Europe

• In Event: Partisanship in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

As the number of negative partisans (NPs) significantly increases in European democracies, this paper aims to explain their voting behavior. First, I distinguish NPs by their positive party identification status and offer two main subcategories of negative partisanship: attached and unattached NPs. Attached NPs are those NPs who hold positive party identification, whereas unattached NPs are those without any party affiliation. I, then, compare NPs with traditional partisans and argue that NPs tend to have higher political interest than those of their traditional counterparts. Furthermore, I argue that the salience of cognitive evaluations of party policies and performance on vote choice supersedes the affective factors for unattached NPs, while attached NPs make their vote decisions based on more affective evaluations. I test my expectations by using individual-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES Modules 1-5) from 1996 to 2019 in 21 European countries. The findings have important implications for the understanding of the dynamics of negative partisanship and the evolving nature of political identification.

Author

• Melek Hilal Eroglu, University of Pittsburgh