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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.

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).

This chapter analyses the triggers of preferential voting in Belgium. Combining both contextual and candidate level information, the authors first test how features of the electoral and political competition (i.e. position on the list, district and party magnitude) influence preferential votes. Then, they focus on the role of individual characteristics of candidates, taking into account not only their socio-demographic background, but also their attitudinal and behavioural attributes. In particular, candidates’ ties with their own local constituencies, previous political experience, as well as the resources and tools they employed during the campaign are widely explored in the chapter.