Mechanisms of Protest Voting: A Proposal of Analyses to Integrate Elections, Parties, and Voters

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During the six months of my JSPS research stay, I had the opportunity to publish two co-authored book chapters: one on the effect of anti-establishment dynamics, such as politicization of EU integration, on voting behaviour (Brussels University Press) and one on the effects of representation dynamics including the so-called ‘partitocracy’ in Belgium (University of Louvain Press).Along with this, in October 2022 I also published a Special Issue of the academic journal Politics of the Low Countries exploring migrant political integration both as a topic framed by anti-establishment parties in their political discourse and as a phenomenon per se, requiring a thorough analysis of migrant political engagement and its systemic and attitudinal drivers.The research period helped me to reach relevant results also with respect to behavior-related research questions. Indeed, thanks to the analysis of multiple cross-country data, I could came to the conclusion that “protest motivations matter”, especially when it comes to strongly disaffected citizens, as their voting calculus tend to exhibit a lower impact of substantive considerations such as ideological proximity to parties and party size. A paper summarizing important results at the individual level in a cross-country perspective based on European Election Study data (ESS) is soon to be submitted to a highly ranked international Political Science journal (European Journal of Political Research).