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Are elections becoming personality contests? A growing literature is concerned about the increasing personalization of politics and its democratic consequences. This paper argues that part of the phenomenon is due to voters using politicians' personalities to infer their party and valence and that voters of populist parties are especially able in this inferential task. Using a varying conjoint experiment in Spain, the author certainly finds evidence that the importance of personality decreases when voters learn both about candidates' party and valence and that this mediating effect is especially relevant for Vox and UP voters. These results dispel concerns about the irrationality of today's politics by showing that the independent effect of personality is minimal and suggesting that populist voters efficiently use the personality of politicians to infer classical vote determinants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent analyses have demonstrated that personality affects political behavior. According to the mediation hypothesis, the effect of personality on political participation is mediated by classical predictors, such as political interest, internal efficacy, political discussion, or the sense that voting is a civic duty. This paper outlines various paths that link personality traits to two participatory activities: voter turnout in European Parliament elections and participation in protest actions. The hypotheses are tested with data from a large, nationally representative, face-to-face survey of the Spanish population conducted before and after the 2009 European Parliament elections using log-linear path models that are well suited to study indirect relationships. The results clearly confirm that the effects of personality traits on voter turnout and protest participation are sizeable but indirect. They are mediated by attitudinal predictors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The normative focus of the study of political behaviour assumes that voters are rational and that all apply the same method of reasoning when they have to choose. Given the limitations of the normative view of voting theory, some authors have chosen to explain the voter's decision from a descriptive perspective. In this paper, we develop an adaptive model to describe the different decision-making processes that voters apply. Our ultimate goal is to identify rules that characterize the political behaviour of individuals. To achieve this, we use a classification technique from the field of automatic learning: decision trees. At the empirical level, we have discovered that Spanish voters apply different decision processes that are guided by the heuristic criterion of cost saving of information about the incumbent, the government's actions and the future of the country's economy. The decision trees obtained enable us to classify voters into four categories: ritualists, voters influenced by affective factors, those influenced by government performance and forward-looking voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to shed new light on the causes of split-ticket voting in concurrent multi-level national and regional elections held under PR electoral rules. Up to now, differences in electoral outcomes in Spanish concurrent elections have been understood as a product of the mechanisms associated with second order elections. Evidence against this interpretation is presented, and alternative explanations from the international literature are tested. We find that, on one hand, Andalusian intrablock and regionalist ticket-splitters weigh their national and regional electoral choices differently: While in the national arena ideology is the main predictor of electoral behavior, at the regional level ticket-splitters tend to cross ideological lines and vote based on the performance of regional politicians or a preference for local leaders. On the other hand, interblock ticket-splitters seem to balance their votes ideologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]