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Nonresponses to vote intention questions notoriously impact the quality of electoral predictions. This issue has gained visibility in the US due to the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Indeed, the failure of many major pollsters in predicting election results in several key states stimulated a renewed attention for the so-called shy Trump supporter hypothesis, according to which Trump supporters would be more likely to hide their vote preference in electoral surveys due to social desirability bias. Interestingly, extant studies generally overlook the role that the socio-political environments could play in respondent decisions to disclose one's own political preferences. In this research note, we test the effect of local political climate on survey respondents' willingness to express their vote intentions, conditional on their ideological orientations. We test our hypotheses by means of logistic regressions on data from the 2020 Cooperative Election Study, matched with prior presidential election results at the county level using data from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. Our findings suggest the political–electoral context of respondents is likely to trigger a social desirability mechanism leading to reticence about one's own preferred political options within the 2020 presidential election. This pattern applies especially to conservative-leaning respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on the nationalization of party systems has found that decentralization of authority leads to increasing territorial heterogeneity of voting behaviour. In this article, we intend to further extant knowledge on this topic by exploring whether different levels of government imply distinct representations of party competition at the citizens' level. We do so by analysing Twitter data collected during the 2015 regional elections in five Italian regions (Liguria, Veneto, Tuscany, Campania and Apulia) to estimate national and regional party configurations by means of multi-dimensional scaling. Analyses show that national party competition is generally perceived in the same way across regions, but representations of regional political spaces tend to stand out from it and also to differ from each other. These results suggest that, in line with the process of political decentralization of authority, voters perceive party competition in different ways according to the level of territorial governance at stake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Within the framework of the current democratic crisis, the electoral success of the so-called anti-establishment parties has been repeatedly and often associated with protest voting. Several scholars have tried to deal with this topic in the past, focusing particularly on the psychological dimension of the matter, i.e. on whether individual support for these actors was actually characterised by protest motivations. Yet, in so doing, they have almost completely overlooked the issue of how protest actually contributes to the electoral performance of apparent protest actors. The aim of this paper is precisely to fill this gap. Indeed, by looking at three Southern European countries (i.e. Greece, Italy and Spain), it aims to test the common-sense hypothesis that a higher strength of protest motivations in voters' minds implies an increasing success of anti-establishment parties at the electoral level. Methodologically, this is accomplished by a series of counterfactual regression models on data from the 2014 European Election Voter Study (EES). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role orientation of political representatives and candidates is a longstanding concern in studies of democratic representation. The growing trend in countries to allow citizens abroad to candidate in homeland elections from afar provides an interesting opportunity for understanding how international mobility and context influences ideas of representation among these emigrant candidates. In public debates, emigrant candidates are often portrayed as delegates of the emigrant constituencies. However, drawing on the paradigmatic case of Italy and an original data set comprising emigrant candidates, we show that the perceptions of styles of representation abroad are more complex. Systemic differences between electoral districts at home and abroad are relevant for explaining why and how candidates develop a trustee or delegate orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After several decades of debate on the so-called protest vote, the extant literature in this field is still far from consistent in conceptualization and analytical perspectives. Yet, at a time of increasing democratic stress, it becomes crucial for political studies to take stock of current research on this topic and assess its general state of health. In the light of this, aim of the present contribution is to piece together the puzzle of analytical perspectives from which scholars and pundits have approached the matter over the years. First, this article will do so at a conceptual level, disentangling different conceptualizations of protest voting. In parallel, it will do so at the technical and empirical level, categorizing both operationalization strategies and findings into alternative strands of research. As a last step, it will summarize the still open issues, organizing them within a unified platform and identifying possible lines of development for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2014 European elections were characterized in many countries by growing support for Eurosceptic parties. This growth was not uniform and not clearly associated with the economic performance of these member states. In this article, we investigate the role played in the 2014 European Parliament elections by a country-specific factor – the composition of government coalitions – different from economic performance. In particular, we argue that in those countries where moderately Eurosceptic parties were more involved in the government, citizens with negative attitudes toward the European Union were more likely to vote for highly Eurosceptic parties. This was especially the case when the governments also included strongly pro-EU parties. The empirical analysis, which is based upon the 2014 European Election Voter Study, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, and the Parliaments and Governments database, confirms our hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on the political rights of nonresident citizens and particularly the concept of political parties abroad. Topics incldue actors elaborating specific outreach and electoral strategies containing candidate selection; and intercepting pressures coming from emigrants and proposing specific measures with respect in improving the political inclusion.