Is Protest Intelligible in Elections? How do Protest Motivations affect Voting Behaviour in Western Europe and how do Political Élites (mis)Interpret them

Although the notion of protest voting is still paradoxically undeveloped in electoral research, this concept is generally understood as casting a vote in order to punish the whole political class and/or system. It implies therefore a communication of the citizens to their élites. The limited commitment of the scientific community in this field so far has been mainly aimed to test whether voting for an apparent ‘protest’ party is actually characterized by a protest motivation or not. However, no one can really exclude that voters may develop counterintuitive ways to protest in elections, e.g. by choosing a party they feel suitable to convey their political malaise, although this is not generally recognized as a vehicle for protest. If confirmed, this would immediately ask us to deal with the fact that – contrary to any normative expectation - protest motivations lend themselves to be easily misread, as well as to be dismissed as not important at the élite’s level, while they actually are, or vice versa. In order to ascertain such possibility, this paper aims at connecting two different types of empirical information: how do protest motivations at the voters’ level affect election outcomes and to what extent political élites are able to infer these signals from such results. The first one, in particular, will be obtained through a series of counterfactual regression models on data of the 2014 European Election Study. Regarding the élites, on the other hand, the analysis will rely on a qualitative content analysis of beliefs and interpretations of election results available on the web. Hopefully, my results will contribute to a wider debate about the state of health of representational processes and electoral institutions in Europe, taking into account that the popular will could not always manifest itself in easily accessible way for the observer.