Why vote for an independent? The relevance of negative identity, independent identity, and dealignment in a pro-independent political environment

Titelman, Noam and Sajuria, Javier (2023) Why vote for an independent? The relevance of negative identity, independent identity, and dealignment in a pro-independent political environment. Party Politics. ISSN 1354-0688

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Abstract

We know that political parties play a crucial role in the electoral processes of established democracies. However, we know much less about how this role fades away. In this paper, we study the case of Chile, a country that, until a few years ago, was cited as an example of a stable and institutionalized party system. We study how the phenomenon of independent candidates has shaken the national party system. We use two separate strategies to study this phenomenon. First, we measure the marginal effect of the independent label, compared to other party labels, using a conjoint experiment. Our findings show that candidates who are presented as independents have a significant increase in their probability of being chosen. Second, we measure whether this electoral effect relates to party identification. We find that respondents show low animosity towards independent candidates and high animosity towards traditional parties. Furthermore, a majority of the studied population can be classified as negative partisans. These findings suggest that the recent emergence of independent candidates is a result of negative views on parties.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://journals.sagepub.com/home/PPQ
Additional Information:	© 2023 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Methodology
Subjects:	J Political Science > JC Political theory J Political Science > JF Political institutions (General)
Date Deposited:	23 May 2024 14:42
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2024 04:17
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/123600

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