Political Sophistication: A Renewed Conceptualization, Operationalization and Explanatory Model
Date Thursday, 17 October
Time 02:00PM - 03:50PM
Venue Umeda intelligent laboratory of Kobe University (8th floor of Umeda gate tower)
Language English
Speaker
Marta Gallina (Catholic University of Louvain)
Abstract
After almost seventy years of studies, political sophistication – i.e. the level of abstraction and consistency of citizens’ political thoughts - has not yet found its place in political science’s literature. This is due, first, to the difficulty of defining such an abstract concept and achieving a suitable operationalization of it and, second, to the complexity of understanding its causes and creating a proper and comprehensive explanatory model.
This research fills both these gaps. First, it focuses on a renewed operationalization of this concept. In order to have an individual measure that takes account also of the contextual level, I build an indicator of political sophistication using multilevel regression’s residuals between pairs of issues’ preferences. Second, it tests an explanatory model that considers both individual and contextual variables. The rationale behind political sophistication’s new measure is that sophisticated people evaluate different domains of policy issues according to a same underlying evaluation schema, i.e. his/her ideological outlook. In other words, sophisticated citizens are considered to be able to constrain their ideas to one single dimension, which is highly connected to their ideological outlook. Ambivalent, not ideological and unconstrained belief systems are evaluated instead as symptom of a lack of political sophistication.
This indicator is used to test a comprehensive explanatory model of political sophistication. In particular, it considers three individual characteristics, i.e. abilities, opportunities and motivations of being sophisticated (Luskin 1990). Moreover, it tests whether the macro-political constraint has an impact on citizens’ constraint, net of other individual variables.
Choosing against? A Renewed Conceptual and Empirical Framework for the Study of Protest Voting in Europe
Date Thursday, 17 October
Time 04:10PM - 06:00PM
Venue Umeda intelligent laboratory of Kobe University (8th floor of Umeda gate tower)
Language English
Speaker
Stefano Camatarri (Waseda University)
Abstract
Despite its vast popularity in public discourse and in academia, the concept of protest voting is still conceptually and empirically underdeveloped in electoral research (van der Brug and Fennema 2007). Indeed, the existence of a protest vote is often inferred from specific information at the aggregate level, such as election results favoring a party, or a candidate, generally recognized as a protest actor in public debate. Yet, such an inference risks to be highly misleading, since a good electoral performance of presumed protest parties or candidates are not necessarily related to an underlying intention to protest. Indeed, one could well contribute to their success also because of many other reasons, including proximity to their policy platform and/or the fact of feeling psychologically close to them. In addition to this, empirical studies on this topic often focus on whether voting for an apparent protest party (e.g., anti-immigrant, far-right, populist, challenger etc.) is actually characterized by a protest motivation or not, while they neglect instances in which the motivation to express protest in one’s vote is present, but not immediately recognisable (e.g. Billiet and Witte 1995; Eirlingsson and Persson 2011; Hernández 2018). Indeed, voters could choose a party that they personally feel suitable to convey their political protest, although this is generally not seen as such in public debate.
Against this background, this presentation aims at reviewing existing research approaches to protest voting, with a view to a renewed framework for the analysis of this phenomenon. In addition, by focusing on European countries, it discusses results of my recent research on how protest considerations affect individual vote choice on the one hand and aggregate election outcomes on the other hand. Analyses rely on the most recent version of the European Election Voter Study (released in 2014), combined with Varieties of Democracy (Vdem) and Chapel Hill expert survey (CHES) data.