In this article, we investigate the moderating role of political sophistication on the vote for populist parties in Belgium. Building on the literature about the diverse determinants of populist party support, we investigate whether issue considerations and populism-related motivations play a bigger role in the electoral calculus of politically sophisticated voters.Using data from the 2019 general elections in Belgium, we focus on the cases of Vlaams Belang (VB) and Parti du Travail de Belgique-Partij van de Arbeid (PTB-PVDA). We find evidence suggesting that political sophistication enhances the impact of populism-related motivations on populist party support, although the effects are contingent on the party. Moreover, we show that, for issue considerations, the moderation effect only comes into play for VB voters: the impact of antiimmigrant considerations is greater at increasing levels of political sophistication.
There is emerging understanding in the literature that voters who have a migration background across Western countries tend to vote for left leaning parties. Yet little is known about whether this implies different drivers of vote choice for citizens with migration background in comparison to natives. This article intends to respond to this question by studying the impact of specific policy issue considerations on the vote of citizens with both migration and non-migration background. To do so, we focus on the 2015 and 2019 Swiss National elections, relying on data
In this article, I investigate the effects of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) on voting behavior of their users. It has been already demonstrated that voters are more likely to follow VAAs recommendation when this latter is consistent with their previous vote intentions. However, the role of partisan attachments in this process has been generally overlooked. The basic idea that I intend to test, indeed, is that partisanship works as strong attitude in voters’ minds, making their preferences less amenable to VAAs advices if compared to those of non-partisan citizens. By implementing logistic regression models on panel data from the 2014 Belgian Federal elections, I show that it is actually unlikely that citizens decide to switch their vote after having played the test, if the advice is not consistent with pre-existing vote intentions. More importantly, I find that the impact of VAAs advice on vote choice is even weaker among citizens that declare to feel attached to a party.
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