University of Michigan needs your feedback to better understand how readers are using openly available ebooks. You can help by taking a short, privacy-friendly survey.
None of the Above: Protest Voting in Latin American Democracies
Around the world each year, millions of citizens turn out to vote but leave their ballots empty or spoil them. Increasingly, campaigns have emerged that promote "invalid" votes like these. Why do citizens choose to cast blank and spoiled votes? And how do campaigns mobilizing the invalid vote influence this decision? None of the Above answers these questions using evidence from presidential and gubernatorial elections in eighteen Latin American democracies. Author Mollie J. Cohen draws on a broad range of methods and sources, incorporating data from electoral management bodies, nationally representative surveys, survey experiments, focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and news sources.
Contrary to received wisdom, this book shows that most citizens cast blank or spoiled votes in presidential elections on purpose. By participating in invalid vote campaigns, citizens can voice their concerns about low-quality candidates while also expressing a preference for high-quality democracy. Campaigns promoting blank and spoiled votes come about more often, and succeed at higher rates, when incumbent politicians undermine the quality of elections. Surprisingly, invalid vote campaigns can shore up the quality of democracy in the short term. None of the Above shows that swings in blank and spoiled vote rates can serve as a warning about the trajectory of a country's democracy.
Figure 3.4. Executive Corruption and Invalid Vote Campaign Emergence Source: Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), original data. Note: The figure shows results from a logistic regression analysis predicting the emergence of an invalid vote campaign using levels of executive corruption (N = 218). Year controls are included, and standard errors are clustered by country. Shaded area indicates 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 3.5. Distinct Party Platforms and Invalid Vote Campaign Emergence Source: Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), original data collection. Note: The figure shows results from a logistic regression analysis predicting the emergence of an invalid vote campaign using levels of the distinctiveness of party platforms (N = 218). Year controls are included, and standard errors are clustered by country. Shaded area indicates 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 3.6. Antiestablishment Candidates and Invalid Vote Campaign Emergence Source: Original data collection, electoral management bodies, Carreras (2012). Note: The figure shows the predicted probability that an invalid vote campaign will emerge when an antiestablishment candidate is (not) present, using the results from a logistic regression analysis (N = 217). Year controls are included, and standard errors are clustered by country. Whiskers indicate 95% confidence intervals around estimates.
Figure 3.7. Election Intimidation and Invalid Vote Campaign Emergence Source: Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), original data. Note: The figure shows results from a logistic regression analysis predicting the emergence of an invalid vote campaign using levels of election intimidation by the incumbent (N = 218). Year controls are included, and standard errors are clustered by country. Shaded area indicates 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 3.8. Invalid Vote Campaign Emergence Conditional on Grievances, Affective Polarization. Source: Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), original data collection. Note: The figure shows results from logistic regression analyses predicting the emergence of an invalid vote campaign using an interaction between each measure of democratic quality and affective polarization (N = 218). Year controls are included, and standard errors are clustered by country. The figure presents 84% confidence intervals around point estimates, which is equivalent to a 95% confidence interval around the difference across lines.
x
This site requires cookies to function correctly.