Negative Voting in Comparative Perspective (Elections, Voting, Technology)

Why do some people conceive their vote choices as mostly against, rather than for a given party/candidate? Who are these negative voters? What macro-level conditions favor the development of negative voting? This volume provides answers to these questions through the first comparative assessment of negative voting in contemporary democracies. It presents a composite theoretical framework for the analysis of negative voting and tests it extensively on originally collected survey data from Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. Examining negative voting as a possible behavioral consequence of affective polarization and negative partisanship, this study sheds light on the electoral implications of increasingly antagonistic attitudes among the electorate. Acknowledgements Contents About the Authors List of Figures List of Tables 1 Introduction References 2 Negative Voting: A Brief Literature Review References 3 Measuring Negative Voting in Democratic Elections References 4 The Negative Voting Dataset: 2020–2022 References 5 The Socio-Demographic Profile of Negative Voters References 6 Anti-incumbency and Negative Voting References 7 Partisanship, Ideology, and Negative Voting References 8 Media Usage and Negative Voting References 9 In-group Affect, Out-group Disdain, and Negative Voting References 10 Negative Voting and Affective Polarization References 11 The Normative Implications of Negative Voting References 12 Conclusions References Appendix Index