Anticipated Election Result and Protest Voting: Why and When Canadian Voters Signal Discontent

Abstract

This article investigates how Canadian voters react to a perceived lack of quality provided by their most preferred parties and how the anticipated election outcome conditions the reactions. The central argument is that a lack of quality motivates voters to signal their discontent by voting insincerely—that is, they cast a protest vote. The effect is expected to be moderated by the anticipated constituency result. The arguments are tested with two-wave panel survey data from the 2015 Canadian federal election, collected by the Making Electoral Democracy Work (MEDW) project. The results support the central argument but remain inconclusive about the expected moderating effects.

Pandemic Populism: Explaining Support for the People's Party of Canada in the 2021 Federal Election

“…Doing so also allows us to identify voters in the 312 ridings out of 338 contested by the PPC. Furthermore, it permits us to determine which ridings are safe seats for a given party, as a voter in a noncompetitive riding (someone whose ballot has no prospect of determining the outcome of the election) may be more inclined to cast a protest vote for a minor party (such as the PPC) than a voter would in a competitive riding (Schimpf, 2019). We operationalize a noncompetitive, or safe, seat as a riding where a single party won by a margin of 10 percentage points or more in the 2021, 2019 and 2015 federal elections.…”

Voting Behaviour in Canada: The State of the Discipline

“…10 Caruana et al (2015) add the stipulation that the party score below the midpoint on the party feeling thermometer. 11 Strategic defection is not the only reason why voters vote insincerely: some do so as a way of signalling their discontent (Schimpf, 2019). 12 Taking advantage of crowdsourcing via MTurk provides an even lower cost way of running experiments, albeit with convenience samples skewed young.…”

“…11Strategic defection is not the only reason why voters vote insincerely: some do so as a way of signalling their discontent (Schimpf, 2019). …”

Voice and Balancing in US Congressional Elections

“…1 Moreover, they may turn out to vote because of a longterm interest in maintaining democratic rule (Downs 1957, 267ff.). 2 Including the two-round presidential ballots of France (Blais 2004), the multiparty plurality contests of Canada (Schimpf 2019), India (Chatterjee and Kamal 2020) and the United Kingdom (Birch and Dennison 2019;Franklin, Niemi, and Whitten 1994;Kang 2004), the proportional system of the Netherlands (Van Spanje and Weber 2019), and the state-level elections of Germany (Kellermann 2008). 3 Using extant work as a prior, vote switching appears more likely than abstention.…”

“… 2 Including the two-round presidential ballots of France (Blais 2004), the multiparty plurality contests of Canada (Schimpf 2019), India (Chatterjee and Kamal 2020) and the United Kingdom (Birch and Dennison 2019; Franklin, Niemi, and Whitten 1994; Kang 2004), the proportional system of the Netherlands (Van Spanje and Weber 2019), and the state-level elections of Germany (Kellermann 2008). …”