Collective Emotions and Protest Vote

Carlo Altomonte (), Gloria Gennaro and Francesco Passarelli

No 7463, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We leverage on important findings in social psychology to build a behavioral theory of protest vote. An individual develops a feeling of resentment if she loses income over time while richer people do not, or if she does not gain as others do, i.e. when her relative deprivation increases. In line with the Intergroup Emotions Theory, this feeling is amplified if the individual identifies with a community experiencing the same feeling. Such a negative collective emotion, which we define as aggrievement, fuels the desire to take revenge against traditional parties and the richer elite, a common trait of populist rhetoric. The theory predicts higher support for the protest party when individuals identify more strongly with their local community and when a higher share of community members are aggrieved. We test this theory using longitudinal data on British households and exploiting the emergence of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Great Britain in the 2010 and 2015 national elections. Empirical findings robustly support theoretical predictions. The psychological mechanism postulated by our theory survives the controls for alternative non-behavioral mechanisms (e.g. information sharing or political activism in local communities).

Keywords: electoral behaviour; protest vote; populism; relative deprivation; community cohesion; UK Independence Party (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pke, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp7463.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: COLLECTIVE EMOTIONS AND PROTEST VOTE (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7463

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().