Diego Garzia

University of Lausanne | UNIL ·  Institut d'études politiques et internationales (IEPI)

Partisan dealignment is recurrently presented in the literature as one of the main drivers of the ‘personalisation of politics’. Yet, on the one hand, the claim that leader effects on voting behaviour are increasing across time is short on comparative evidence. On the other hand, there is limited empirical evidence that such an increase is due to d...

Charismatic leaders are often assumed to drive the electoral success of populist radical right parties. Yet, little attention is given to how voter evaluations of leaders influence individual voting behavior. To our knowledge, no systematic and comparative tests of this empirical question exist. In this paper, we test to what extent voters’ support...

Television is customarily put forward as a driver of the “personalization of politics.” The characteristics of this visual medium arguably accentuate personality at the expense of substantive programmatic goals, downplaying partisan attachments and ideology as determinants of the vote in favor of candidate and party leader assessments. While there...

Partisan dealignment has been frequently advanced as a pivotal driver of the personalization of voting behavior. As voters’ long-term attachments with parties eroded, it is argued that partisanship has lost importance to short-term factors, like voters’ evaluations of party leaders. Such theoretical reasoning has been applied recurrently in researc...

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the relationship between media exposure and leader effects on voting through an analysis of Italy –– an ideal case for the study of the personalization of politics and its connection with political communication. The results show the dominance of leader effects among voters strongly exposed to televisi...

This section of our empirical analysis connects negative voting to affective polarization (AP) looking at both its quantity and its polarity. Results show that voters characterized by higher levels on the quantity of AP (i.e., the extent to which they like the in-party more than the out-party) are actually less likely to cast a negative vote. When...

Through a set of CAWI surveys fielded in the context of the latest elections in Canada, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the United States, held between 2020 and 2022, we retrieve data on negative voting covering presidential, semi-presidential, Westminster parliamentary and proportional parliamentary systems. Our results show that negative vo...

We discuss issues related with the measurement of negative voting in multi-party democracies. Using proxies of negative voting questions from pre-existent data sources, we are able to get a rough sense of the relevance of negative voting in different elections. Nonetheless, the limited availability of these items across countries hinders comparativ...

This chapter characterizes negative voters in terms of their sociodemographic profile. We focus in particular on respondents’ age, gender, educational level and levels of interest in politics. We perform correlation analyses and show that negative voters tend to be older and relatively uninterested in political matters.

A clearer pattern stands out regarding the political profile of negative voters. The findings from the analysis of the magnitude and direction of negative voting in the different countries confirm the intuition that negative voting is largely motivated by a reaction to incumbency performance. Negative voters hold more negative views of the country’...

This chapter tackles the relationship between negative voting and its proposed affective component. Our findings show that negative affect is present among positive and negative voters alike. Contrary to the most immediate expectation that negative voting would be the product of disproportionate negativity among negative voters, however, the result...

In this chapter, we engage with the normative implications of negative voting for democratic representation. Is negative voting necessarily bad for democracy? We address these issues through two exercises. First, we simulate the outcome of the elections under analysis had nobody cast a negative vote, to get a sense of the impact of negative voting...

In this chapter, we explore the relationship between exposure to political information in old and new media, and negative voting in the five elections analyzed. The results suggest that consumers of political information on newspapers and television generally tend to vote for, rather than against. Contrary to our original expectation, negative vote...

We start by reviewing the brief literature on negative voting, highlighting the main theoretical perspectives on the phenomenon. While negative voting has been originally conceptualized in rational choice terms, under the framework of retrospective/economic voting, or in connection to long-lasting political identities, we propose to specify and tes...

The analyses presented in this chapter show quite clearly that negative voting is inversely related to the strength of partisanship. The largest share of negative voters in each country is to be found among independents and leaners. The results also show that negative voters are less aligned ideologically with the party they voted for than positive...

Research indicates that affective polarization pervades contemporary democracies worldwide. Although some studies identify party leaders as polarizing agents, affective polarization has been predominantly conceptualized as a product of in-/out-party feelings. This study compares levels of party affective polarization (PAP) and leader affective pola...

Existent research shows that affective polarization has been intensifying in some publics, diminishing in others, and remaining stable in most. We contribute to this debate by providing the most encompassing comparative and longitudinal account of affective polarization so far. We resort to a newly assembled dataset able to track partisan affect, w...

With this paper, we pay tribute to Peter Mair by looking back at the three waves (2009, 2014, 2019) of the pan-European Voting Advice Application (VAA) EU Profiler/euandi – a project in which Peter Mair had a very crucial role in its early years. We describe the unique standing of the EU Profiler/euandi in the VAA landscape and take an analytical l...

This thematic issue deals with the “negative” side of politics, more specifically with dynamics of political aggressiveness and ideological opposition in voters and elites. Why do candidates “go negative” on their rivals? To what extent are voters entrenched into opposing camps parted by political tribalism? And are these dynamics related to the (d...

The Italian parliamentary election of 2022 was called following Mario Draghi’s resignation in June. The campaign took place – for the first time in Italian history – over the summer. Yet, its crucial moments occurred in the very first days, when parties had to present the respective coalition strategies. In a matter of weeks, Italy’s political syst...

About one third of American voters cast a vote more ‘against’ than ‘for’ a candidate in the 2020 Presidential election. This pattern, designated by negative voting, has been initially understood by rational choice scholarship as a product of cognitive dissonance and/or retrospective evaluations. This article revisits this concept through the affect...

The classic heuristics of voting behaviour have been eroded overtime especially in well-established democracies. Ideology, party identification, and social class have been gradually replaced by short-period factors. In particular, the personalization has represented an innovative variable that significantly contributes to explain voting behaviour....

Existing research on political parties’ policy positions has traditionally relied on expert surveys and/or party manifesto data. More recently, Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have been increasingly used as an additional method for locating parties in the policy space, with a closer focus on concrete policy issues. In this manuscript, we examine...

Leaders without Partisans examines the changing impact of party leader evaluations on voters’ behavior in parliamentary elections. The decline of traditional social cleavages, the pervasive mediatization of the political scene, and the media’s growing tendency to portray politics in “personalistic” terms all led to the hypothesis that leaders matte...

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 b...

Television is customarily put forward as a driver of the “personalization of politics.” The characteristics of this visual medium arguably accentuate personality at the expense of substantive programmatic goals, downplaying partisan attachments and ideology as determinants of the vote in favor of candidate and party leader assessments. While there...

Recent developments in Western societies have motivated a growing consideration of the role of negativity in public opinion and political behavior research. In this article, we review the scant (and largely disconnected) scientific literature on negativity and political behavior, merging contributions from social psychology, public opinion, and ele...

This article aims to offer some analytical tools for putting the newly formed Draghi government in perspective. As Mario Draghi is in many ways the technocrat par excellence, this article provides a comparison of his cabinet with the technocratic Monti government of 2011–2013. We list the similarities and differences between the two cabinets, highl...

This article offers a comparative analysis of parties’ position on foreign and security issues in the EU28 across the EP elections of 2009 and 2014. First, we map the position of the parties on selected foreign policy and security issues in both 2009 and 2014. Second, we measure the extent to which party positions on such issues remained stable acr...

This paper explores the extent to which different party systems in Europe effectively represent their citizens. We argue that many European countries suffer from a “representative deficit”, which occurs when a significant portion of citizens have to vote for a political party whose stated views are actually quite different from their own. We measur...

This data article provides a descriptive overview of the “EU Profiler/euandi trend file (2009-2019)“ dataset and the data collection methods. The dataset compiles party position data from three consecutive pan-European Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), developed by the European University Institute for the European Parliament elections in 2009, 20...

This chapter deals with persuasion processes in modern elections. It focuses on the im pact of so-called Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) that are becoming ever more popular among citizens in the Western world and beyond. By matching the political preferences of voters with the supply side (i.e., parties and candidates) in the campaign, these tool...

The last half-century has been a defining period for the development of political science in Europe: disciplinary norms have become institutionalized in professional organizations, training units, and research centres; the scholarly community has dramatically grown in size across the continent; the analytical and methodological tools of the discipl...

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online tools that assist citizens with their voting decisions. They are offered to voters before elections in many countries and have experienced remarkable success. Recently flourishing research on VAAs addresses this phenomenon and provides explanations for the dissemination and popularity of these tools. Mor...

Over the last decades, the “personalization of politics” has turned into one of the defining elements of the democratic process. The common wisdom that sees popular political leaders as a fundamental electoral asset for their own parties has found increasing support in the existing comparative literature. Equally crucial aspects, such as the relati...

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) help users casting a vote by offering an explicit ranking of viable options. The wide amount of readily available information provided by VAAs to users has been shown to contribute to reducing the transactional costs involved in gathering relevant political information. Available evidence also supports the idea tha...

Previous studies have portrayed the personalisation of politics as a consequence of changes in the electoral market and the resulting transformations at the party level. However, empirical research has not reached a consensus on the degree to which this process has had an impact on citizens’ voting choices. An emerging body of comparative literatur...

This introductory essay to the Special Issue presents the articles which from various perspectives – representation, personalisation, partisanship and accountability – analyse the changing relationship between parties and voters in contemporary Italian politics. This collection shows that the Italian party system appears responsive to people’s dema...

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have experienced a great deal of success over the past decade, and are now used in many countries around the world. This editorial introduces a Special Issue resulting from a section of the 2015 European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) conference in Montreal, organized by the ECPR's official VAA Research N...

This article provides an empirical assessment of the causal structure underlying the core dependent variable of electoral research (the vote) and two of its most notable predictors (partisanship and leader evaluations). A critical review of traditional models of voting highlights the need to account for the reciprocal relationship between the main...

This article offers an empirically driven critical consideration of the idea of transnationalising Europe’s voting space, which would mean allowing European citizens to vote for a party from any member state at the European Parliament elections. We argue that such a move would reduce the second-order problem in European elections, as it would force...

Throughout the years, political scientists have devised a multitude of techniques to position political parties on various ideological and policy/issue dimensions. So far, however, none of these techniques was able to evolve into a “gold standard” in party positioning. Against this background, one could recently witness the appearance of a new meth...

A growing literature highlights the importance of leader image as a determinant of voting in contemporary democracies and as a force now paralleling the explanatory power of traditional structural and ideological factors affecting voting choice. Yet the actual effect of leaders in the citizen’s vote calculus remains uncertain because of the potenti...

Voting Advice Applications and Electoral Behaviour : An Overview Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have long been considered as an interesting epiphenomenon. It is only in recent years that political scientists and sociologists began to study VAAs and their potential effects on users, from both an empirical and a normative point of view. The object...

In recent decades, citizens have grown increasingly distrustful of politics and its actors. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to shed light on the role of citizens themselves in the process by focusing on the determinants of their voting choices. As a matter of fact, a substantial proportion of voters in democratic elections actuall...

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have become an integral part of many electoral campaigns in modern democracies. VAAs allow users to compare, on the Internet, their political preferences with the positions of parties and candidates prior to an election. In recent elections in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany, more than a quarter of the re...

In the increasingly diversified environment of political communication, leaders’ popularity may rest not only on the voters’ main sources of political information, but also on the degree of congruence between leader and media communication styles and requirements. Using ITANES Rolling Cross Section (RCS) CAWI survey, conducted on a sample of 8.700...

In the increasingly diversified environment of political communication, leaders’ popularity may rest not only on the voters’ main sources of political information, but also on the degree of congruence between leader and media communication styles and requirements. Using ITANES Rolling Cross Section (RCS) CAWI survey, conducted on a sample of 8.700...

Building on MEP Andrew Duff’s proposal to create a limited pan-European constituency for electing representatives to the European Parliament, this paper argues that there are good reasons for believing that such an institution would better be built around national parties rather than Europarties as they currently exist. Using data from a Voting Adv...

Propensity-to-vote (PTV) scores are ever more commonly used in electoral research as a measure of electoral utilities. Yet a growing literature employs them as dependent variable in the voting equation in place of the lower information granted by vote recall questions. However, this choice can be seen as problematic because of the very structure of...

Nowadays it is commonplace to argue that candidates' personal characteristics play a large part in determining how individuals vote. In the domain of political marketing this assumption is often given for granted, and no clear conceptual understanding of how image crafting techniques affect voters has emerged. This article is an attempt to link pol...

Se le si analizza alla luce del ruolo giocato dai leader di partito, le elezioni politiche del 2013 hanno presentato aspetti tanto di continuità quanto di rottura rispetto al passato. Come nelle cinque elezioni politiche precedenti dal 1994, la principale forza del centrodestra ha avuto alla sua guida Silvio Berlusconi, mentre al centrosinistra si...

This article investigates the attitudinal drivers of partisanship in Western Europe, focusing in particular on the role exerted by voters’ evaluation of party leaders. The cross-sectional analysis is performed on pooled national election study data from three established parliamentary democracies (Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands). Results hig...

This article investigates the effects of the deep transformations in the relationship between West European class-mass parties and their electorates. Particular attention is paid to the changing nature of individuals' partisan attachments, which are hypothesized to be less rooted in social and ideological identities and more in individual attitudes...

Social‐psychological models of voting behaviour systematically downsize the relevance of party leader evaluations by conceiving them as mere consequences of causally prior partisan attachments. However, the validity of this interpretation depends heavily on the effectively exogenous status of party identification. Empirical research shows that the...

Previous studies have portrayed the personalization of politics as a consequence of the changes in the electoral market and the resulting transformations at the party level. However, empirical research has not reached a consensus on the extent to which this process has actually exerted its impact on citizens’ voting calculus. Partisan identificatio...

Este trabajo evalúa la validez de diferentes modelos interpretativos del comportamiento electoral en las elecciones europeas partiendo del resultado de junio de 2009. Nos centramos, en primer lugar, en modelos que conectan el voto europeo con aspectos políticos basados en el nivel nacional (modelo de segundo orden) y en el ciclo electoral doméstico...

Este trabajo evalúa la validez de diferentes modelos interpretativos del comportamiento electoral en las elecciones europeas partiendo del resultado de junio de 2009. Nos centramos, en primer lugar, en modelos que conectan el voto europeo con aspectos políticos basados en el nivel nacional (modelo de segundo orden) y en el ciclo electoral doméstico...

In recent years, Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have become a relevant object of political science research. The aim of this paper is to develop a map of the existing literature and to outline a research agenda for this increasingly relevant tool and its role within modern democracies. Starting point of the paper is the dissemination of VAAs in...