Piecing the Puzzle Together: A Critical Review of Contemporary Research on Protest Voting
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929919862149 |
| Subject Matter | State of the Art |
research-article2019
State of the Art
Political Studies Review
2020, Vol. 18(4) 611 –619
Piecing the Puzzle Together:
© The Author(s) 2019
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A Critical Review of
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919862149
DOI: 10.1177/1478929919862149
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Contemporary Research
on Protest Voting
Stefano Camatarri
Abstract
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.
Keywords
protest voting, protest parties, political dissatisfaction, political concepts, state-of-the-art review
Accepted: 12 March 2019
Introduction
Protest voting is probably one of the most striking paradoxes of our political era. Although
very often used in public discourse and in academe this phrase is still far from consistent
in conceptualization and analytical perspectives rarely clearly specified. And yet protest
voting is definitely a research topic on the rise. As evidence thereof, suffice it to mention
the more than doubled trend of publications dealing with this topic over the last decade,
increased from 914 units in 2008 to 1990 units in 2018.1 In truth, a similar state of affairs
should not be surprising at all, as protest voting has always been first and foremost a
Centre de science politique et de politique comparée (CESPOL), Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-
la-Neuve, Belgium
Corresponding author:
Stefano Camatarri, Centre de science politique et de politique comparée (CESPOL), Université catholique
de Louvain, Place Montesquieu 1, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Email: stefano.camatarri@uclouvain.be
612
Political Studies Review 18(4)
suggestive commonplace of political commentary, before a substantive research object.
In the wake of pundits, political scientists and analysts having often tried to assess its
existence by intuitively looking at peculiar macro-level dynamics, such as shocking or at
least unexpected electoral results, favoring a party (or a candidate) generally is recog-
nized as a vehicle for protest in public debate. Occasionally, an electoral earthquake may
indeed take place in a context of protest movements or at least in a political climate
characterized by a widespread sense of frustration and dissatisfaction toward the poor
performance of the government or even of the representational system. Under such condi-
tions, observers and scholars tend often to conclude that the micro-foundations of the
electoral success of a given party are indeed motivations merely inspired by a voting
against logic. On the other hand, we also know that protest voting as such is an individual
act, and that any reliable strategy to assess it should necessarily focus on the psychologi-
cal sphere of the voter.
The tension between these two elements, that is, the psychological dimension of a pro-
test vote and its external manifestation in the form of election outcomes, has never been
completely resolved. This is particularly reflected by the fact that many empirical studies,
although claiming to analyze individual protest votes, do it by focusing on parties that are
already believed to be conveyers of an electoral protest according to media and/or elites’
interpretations of election results. Yet, as long as something like protest voting is concerned,
elements of public discourse should not influence the focus of the analysis, but rather should
be subject to it. More precisely, voters and elites should be considered as part of the same
coordination game, in which, as in any coordination problem, the mutual and reflexive
expectations between the involved actors assume a central importance.
Clearly, all this suggests that there is a necessity to renew and refine the current ana-
lytical framework on protest voting. For this purpose, the present contribution aims to
shed some light on the various pieces of the protest voting issue and to systematize them
for the purposes of future research in times of democratic stress. This will be done by
describing two different research approaches to protest voting: a party-based and a voter-
based one, each of which is characterized by their own conceptualization and operation-
alization strategies, as well as by specific strands of empirical research and findings.
Hopefully, this effort will provide a useful map, allowing to take stock of such a frag-
mented and multi-faceted context and successfully guiding them through it.
Party-Based Approaches to Protest Voting
Definitional Issues: Looking for Signs of Voters’ Protestness at the Party
Level
Although successively labeled as unsatisfactory for an actual understanding of protest
voting as an individual act (Bergh, 2004), party-based studies has actually been the first
attempt through which researchers tried to make their mind up with a new era of elec-
toral instability in Western Europe. Faced with an apparent pattern of de-freezing of
party systems since the 1970s (Mair, 1998), indeed, the idea that the fortunes of new-
comers of political competition could be due to their ability to mobilize a diffused sense
of political malaise within the electorate found significant success both in the scientific
community and in public debate. On that base, some of these parties were named as
protest parties and their voters, as a consequence, as de facto protest voters. In the light
of an in-depth review of existing research on this point, we could argue that such
Camatarri
613
labeling procedure has generally taken place on the basis of at least two alternative
criteria. The first is looking at the ideological appeal, or policy profile, of the party
voted for, while the...
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