Beyond Trump by Alberto Martinelli

Author:Alberto Martinelli [Martinelli, Alberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edizioni Epoké
Published: 2017-02-03T12:07:56+00:00

External voters

63.0

57.6

47.5

Available voters

16.3

18.0

16.1

Certain voters

20.7

24.4

34.4

N

881

855

955

As will be seen, in 2014 Syriza appeared to have the largest percentage of voters who preferred it to any other party. The number of available voters was, however, almost the same for all the three parties.

In order to gauge which of the demographic, social or attitudinal characteristics most differentiates the three types of voters, we built a model in which the classification shown in Table 2 was the dependent variable. The purpose of the model was to estimate the probabilities of a respondent being an external, or available or certain voter, given his/her individual characteristics.

We considered all the major factors that previous studies on voters for these parties suggest are important: being young, highly-educated, suffering employment problems, opinion on the economy, evaluation of the government’s performance, attitudes towards immigration, Europe, and disaffection with political institutions. Thus, we included the following in our model: gender (as control), age (being between 18 to 24 years old vs. older cohorts), level of education, job market position, experience, direct or indirect, of job loss. Moreover, we added other attitudes, such as the opinion that the economy had worsened in the previous year, blame on the government. Other factors were: opinion on income redistribution, gay marriage, the level of control on the number of immigrants, on European integration, on financial support for another country if it is in crisis, confidence in the national Parliament. Finally, we incorporated ideology, assessed by left-right self-placement, into the model.

There is a further expectation concerning the levels of competitiveness of the three parties that we could control with our model, an expectation frequently aired by the media. The argument is that parties like the FSM, Podemos, and Syriza are competitive and attractive because they benefit from new transnational divisions, i.e. rifts that are not country-specific but pan-European (the EU crisis, the Great Recession, immigration flows, discontent with the elite, etc). Inferring a broad expectation from this argument, we may posit that these parties are competitive not only because voters who are available to vote for one of these parties have a profile close to that of their certain voters, but also because this overlap between the profiles is the same for the three parties, equally occurring in the three countries.

In order to test this expectation, we first estimated the direct effects of individual characteristics on the probability of being certain, available or external voters in a cross-country pooled dataset, including the countries as control8. We thus assumed that the differences across individuals do not depend on the fact that voters are voters in different countries (i.e. exposed to a different political or economic context), but they depend on individual characteristics and attitudes reacting to a pan-European political climate. However, to make the test more robust, we estimated another model with the same

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