Publications
Political Misinformation in the Digital Age during a Pandemic: Partisanship, Propaganda, and Democratic Decision-making
Published in Frontiers Media SA, 2022
High quality information is critical for the functioning of democracy. Yet, in the era of growing prominence of social media and a high choice news media environment, it is increasingly difficult for citizens to judge the quality of the information they encounter in their daily lives. This Research Topic centers around two critical challenges for the scholarship on political misinformation. First, on the demand-side, questions remain around who is vulnerable to misinformation and how best to correct mistaken beliefs. Insights from psychology show that belief formation can serve accuracy motivations or be distorted by directional reasoning that is motivated by partisanship, ideology, or social identity, and the limits of one’s cognitive ability and media literacy. More research is needed to improve our understanding of these mechanisms, by identifying the antecedents, covariates, and moderators of misinformation and viable strategies to reduce the influence of false news in order to foster more accurate political reasoning. Second, on the supply-side, we lack an understanding of the mechanisms that generate and propagate political misinformation in the digital age. This is critical to understanding how to halt the spread of false news while increasing the circulation of news from credible sources. While more recent studies focus on social media, mainstream media also maintains an important role in the diffusion (and potential correction) of misinformation. This edited volume collects 13 articles tackling these challenges from various disciplinary perspectives and bringing together 59 internationally-renown misinformation scholars from around the world. Read more
Recommended citation: De Angelis, Andrea, Christina E Farhart, Eric Merkley, and Dominik A Stecula, eds. 2022. Political Misinformation in the Digital Age During a Pandemic: Partisanship, Propaganda, and Democratic Decision-Making. Frontiers Media SA. DOI: 10.3389/978-2-88976-454-9. https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/16048/political-misinformation-in-the-digital-age-during-a-pandemic-partisanship-propaganda-and-democratic
Leaders without Partisans: dealignment, media change, and the personalization of politics
Published in ECPR Press / Rowman & Littlefield, 2021
Leaders without Partisans examines the changing impact of party leader evaluations on voters’ behavior in parliamentary elections. The decline of traditional social cleavages, the pervasive mediatization of the political scene, and the media’s growing tendency to portray politics in “personalistic” terms all led to the hypothesis that leaders matter more for the way individuals vote and, often, the way elections turn out. This study offers the most comprehensive longitudinal assessment of this hypothesis so far. The authors develop a composite theoretical framework – based on currently disconnected strands of research from party, media, and electoral studies – and test it empirically on the most encompassing set of national election study datasets ever assembled. The labor-intensive harmonization effort produces an unprecedented dataset pooling information for a total of 129 parliamentary elections conducted between 1961 and 2018 in 14 West European countries. The book provides evidence of the longitudinal growth in leader effects on vote choice and on turnout. The process of partisan dealignment and changes in the structure of mass communication in Western societies are identified as the main drivers of personalization in voting behavior. Read more
Recommended citation: Garzia, Diego, Frederico Ferreira da Silva, and Andrea De Angelis. 2021. Leaders without Partisans: Dealignment, Media Change, and the Personalization of Politics. Colchester: ECPR Press. ISBN: 978-1-5381-5676-6. https://www.amazon.com/Leaders-without-Partisans-Dealignment-Personalization/dp/1538156768
From party to leader mobilization? The personalization of voter turnout
Published in Party Politics, 2021
Partisan dealignment has been frequently advanced as a pivotal driver of the personalization of voting behavior. As voters’ long-term attachments with parties eroded, it is argued that partisanship has lost importance to short-term factors, like voters’ evaluations of party leaders. Such theoretical reasoning has been applied recurrently in research dedicated to explaining vote choice. However, we hypothesize that dealignment can downplay partisanship’s impact vis-à-vis leaders in the same way regarding turnout decisions. This article aims at demonstrating the importance of voters’ evaluations of party leaders in their probability to turn out in parliamentary elections through a novel data set pooling 52 national election surveys from 13 Western European parliamentary democracies between 1974 and 2016. The results confirm the increasing relevance of leaders in explaining turnout decisions and a decline of partisanship’s mobilizing ability. These trends are further accentuated among individuals with a television-dominated media diet, demonstrating the role of media change in driving this process. Read more
Recommended citation: Ferreira da Silva, F., Garzia, D., and A. De Angelis (2021). From party to leader mobilization? The personalization of voter turnout, Party Politics, Vol. 27(2): 220-233. https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/WMWGTJU5BJRDZCEVVPB9/full
How Voters Distort their Perceptions and Why this Matters
Published in Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion, 2020
Voters’ ability to perceive political parties’ positions on policy scales is a precondition for a functioning and responsive electoral democracy. Appropriate measures of policy distance are thus key to addressing the link between political parties and the citizens. This chapter reviews the scholarship on ideal point estimation, identifying the main methodological and substantial implications for empirical studies involving issue scales. Next, the chapter applies two-stage Bayesian Aldrich-McKelvey scaling to European Election Studies data to find evidence of systematic perceptual distortions: right-wing voters perceive political parties as more progressive than they actually are, while knowledgeable voters perceive greater differences between parties. Perceptual bias is also shown to correlate with standard polarization measures based on perceived party positions. Read more
Recommended citation: De Angelis, Andrea (2020). How Voters Distort their Perceptions and Why this Matters. In: Suhay, E., Grofman, B., and Trechsel, A., The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion, pp. 946-976. https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190860806.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190860806-e-55
Taking Cues from the Government: Heuristic versus Systematic Processing in a Constitutional Referendum
Published in West European Politics, 2020
One of the main criticisms of direct democracy is that it places excessive demands on voters. Are citizens competent enough to vote directly on policy issues? When stakes are high, do citizens mainly follow elites’ signals or do they decide in line with their issue preferences? This article addresses these questions in a multi-method setting by combining observational and experimental data from an original three-wave panel survey conducted during the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum. In particular, Finite Mixture Models are employed to model voters’ heterogeneous strategies of information processing. Findings show that heuristic voting based on government evaluation prevails over policy-related voting. More specifically, less politically sophisticated and partisan voters relied on government assessment as a heuristic, while sophisticated and independent voters based their decisions mostly on their assessment of the reform. Implications for the question of citizens’ competence in direct democracy are discussed. Read more
Recommended citation: De Angelis, Andrea, Colombo, Celine, and Morisi, Davide (2020). Taking cues from the government: heuristic versus systematic processing in a constitutional referendum. West European Politics, Vol. 43(4): 845 - 868. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402382.2019.1633836
Image that Matters: News Media Consumption and Party Leader Effects on Voting Behavior
Published in The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2020
Television is customarily put forward as a driver of the “personalization of politics.” The characteristics of this visual medium arguably accentuate personality at the expense of substantive programmatic goals, downplaying partisan attachments and ideology as determinants of the vote in favor of candidate and party leader assessments. While there is evidence of this trend for presidential democracies, notably the United States, this linkage is yet to be fully explored for parliamentary democracies undergoing a process of personalization. This study addresses this gap through an analysis of pooled national election study data from thirteen Western European parliamentary democracies collected between 1982 and 2016. Our results show that leader effects are significantly stronger among individuals with a television-dominant media diet. The findings provide support to the yet underdeveloped theoretical relationship between media change and the personalization of politics, while also speaking to the broader question involving the importance of media for contemporary democratic elections. Read more
Recommended citation: Garzia, Diego, da Silva, Frederico, and De Angelis, Andrea (2020). Image that Matters: News Media Consumption and Party Leader Effects on Voting Behavior. The International Journal of Press/Politics, Vol. 25(2): 238 - 259. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1940161219894979
Who is afraid of a change? Ideological differences in support for the status quo in direct democracy
Published in Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 2019
Research has documented that individuals display a bias for preserving the status quo across numerous domains of decision-making, including elections for candidates and referendums. Yet, it is not clear whether thinking about a political reform as a change to the status quo actually makes voters less likely to support it. We investigate this possibility in a referendum campaign, in which we prime a representative sample of voters with a “change cue” evoking the modification of the status quo related to a proposed reform. Our findings show that support for a referendum proposal decreases when voters consider that it will change the status quo, but only among right-wing voters. The effect is stronger among less knowledgeable voters on the right (but not on the left) of the political spectrum. Furthermore, we find that the priming manipulation has no effect in the presence of campaign arguments, thus suggesting that voters might discard peripheral cues when substantial policy information is available. These findings have relevant implications for the goal of achieving political change in democratic politics, and highlight the key role of ideology in moderating the status-quo bias in political decision-making. Read more
Recommended citation: Morisi, D., Colombo, C. and De Angelis, A. (2019). Who is afraid of a change? Ideological differences in support for the status quo in direct democracy. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, online first. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FUFDVHAT3U5FKX3HGWQC/full?target=10.1080/17457289.2019.1698048
Issue Yield and Party Strategy in Multiparty Competition
Published in Comparative Political Studies, 2017
The issue yield model introduced a theory of the herestethic use of policy issues as strategic resources in multidimensional party competition. We extend the model by systematically addressing the specificities of issue yield dynamics in multiparty systems, with special regard to parties’ issue yield rankings (relative position) and issue yield heterogeneity (differentiation) on each issue. Second, we introduce a novel research design for original data collection that allows for a more systematic testing of the model, by featuring (a) a large number of policy issues, (b) the use of Twitter content for coding parties’ issue emphasis, and (c) an appropriate time sequence for measuring issue yield configurations and issue emphasis. We finally present findings from a pilot implementation of such design, performed on the occasion of the 2014 European Parliament election in Italy. Findings confirm the soundness of the design and provide support for the newly introduced hypotheses about multiparty competition. Read more
Recommended citation: De Sio, L., De Angelis, A., and V. Emanuele (2017). Issue Yield and Party Strategy in Multiparty Competition. Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 51(9): - 1238. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0010414017730082
Voting Advice Applications and Electoral Participation: A Multi-Method Study
Published in Political Communication, 2017
Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) help users casting a vote by offering an explicit ranking of viable options. The wide amount of readily available information provided by VAAs to users has been shown to contribute to reducing the transactional costs involved in gathering relevant political information. Available evidence also supports the idea that VAA users are more likely to cast a ballot in elections as a result. The extent to which electoral participation is caused by using a VAA, however, remains unclear. Against this background, we reassess the mobilizing effect of VAAs by means of a multi-method approach. Our cross-sectional analysis of 12 national election study data sets provides further support to the idea that VAA usage increases users’ chances of casting a ballot in elections as compared to non-users. This conclusion is strengthened by the results of a randomized field experiment conducted in the context of the 2013 Italian parliamentary election. Read more
Recommended citation: Garzia, D., Trechsel, A. H., and De Angelis, A. (2017). Voting Advice Applications and Electoral Participation: A Multi-Method Study. Political Communication. Vol. 34(3): 424-443. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10584609.2016.1267053?journalCode=upcp20
Partisanship, leader evaluations and the vote: disentangling the new iron triangle in electoral research
Published in Comparative European Politics, 2016
This article provides an empirical assessment of the causal structure underlying the core dependent variable of electoral research (the vote) and two of its most notable predictors (partisanship and leader evaluations). A critical review of traditional models of voting highlights the need to account for the reciprocal relationship between the main predictors as well as for the potential feedback stemming from the dependent variable. In the light of these considerations, a new ‘iron triangle’ of electoral research would seem to take shape, with partisanship, leader evaluations and the vote tight to each other by a strong link of reciprocal causation. Making use of pre-/post-election surveys from Britain and Italy, the empirical analysis provides evidence for a strong effect of past behavior on political attitudes. However, past behavior seems to exert its effect mainly on partisan attitudes, whereas party leader evaluations appear only slightly affected. The results point to the considerably weakened role of partisanship as attitudinal anchor of vote choice. Leader evaluations, on the contrary, emerge as a crucial component in the voting decision. Read more
Recommended citation: Garzia, D. and De Angelis, A. 2016. Partisanship, leader evaluations and the vote: Disentangling the new iron triangle in electoral research. Comparative European Politics. Vol. 14 (5): 604-625. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057%2Fcep.2014.36
euandi: Project Description and Datasets Documentation
Published in Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies Research Paper Series, 2015
In occasion of the European Parliament elections of 2014, EUDO launched euandi (reads: EU and I). The academic relevance of the euandi endeavour lies primarily in its choice to stick to the party positioning methodology already employed by the EU Profiler in 2009 as well as in the choice to keep as many policy items as possible in the 2014 questionnaire in order to allow cross-national, longitudinal research on party competition and voting behaviour in the EU across a five-year period. In this paper, we present the euandi project in a nutshell, the making of the questionnaire and the way in which political parties have been coded. Then, we illustrate the functioning of the application and the specifics of the resulting user dataset, comprising the opinions of 400.000 unique users that completed the euandi questionnaire during the six weeks preceding the EP elections of 2014. Read more
Recommended citation: Garzia, Diego and Trechsel, Alexander H. and De Sio, Lorenzo and De Angelis, Andrea, euandi: Project Description and Datasets Documentation (January 2015). Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies Research Paper No. RSCAS 2015/01. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2553919 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2553919 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2553919
The impact of Voting Advice Applications on electoral participation
Published in ECPR Press, 2014
With the growing number of voters resorting to VAAs at election time, interest has arisen concerning the potential effect of these tools on the political behaviour of the users. We focus on one of the crucial questions in this strand of literature, namely: What is the effect of VAA-usage on users’ patterns of electoral participation? We analyse survey data from Finland, Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland, with treatment effect model to tackle the issue of self-selection into VAA usage. Results point towards a significant impact of VAAs on electoral participation. Read more
Recommended citation: Garzia, D. and De Angelis, A. and Pianzola Joelle (2015). The impact of Voting Advice Applications on electoral participation. In Garzia, D. and Marschall, S., Matching voters with parties and candidates: Voting Advice Applications in a comparative perspective”. ECPR press. http://press.ecpr.eu/book_details.asp?bookTitleID=104
Individual level dynamics of PTV change across the electoral cycle
Published in Electoral Studies, 2013
Propensity-to-vote (PTV) scores are ever more commonly used in electoral research as a measure of electoral utilities. Yet a growing literature employs them as dependent variable in the voting equation in place of the lower information granted by vote recall questions. However, this choice can be seen as problematic because of the very structure of election survey research. To the extent that voters’ PTVs are measured in post-election surveys (as it is often the case) these are likely to result endogenously produced by actual voting behavior in the past election – thus partly undermining the validity of the PTV question which, ideally, should not be related to any specific election. In this paper, we try to disentangle the relationship between short-term political attitudes (leader evaluations, issue proximity, economic assessments) and voters’ changing patterns of propensities to vote in both an electoral and a non-electoral context. The latter scenario serves as a means to rule out the potentially contaminating effect of voting choices on voters’ PTVs. The data comes from two panel surveys of Italian voters conducted by ITANES in occasion of the 2006 general election, and in 2011 (that is, in a non-electoral year) respectively. Read more
Recommended citation: De Angelis, A. and Garzia, D. 2013. Individual level dynamics of PTV change across the electoral cycle. Electoral Studies. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379413000917
Government approval in Italy: Political cycle, economic expectations and TV coverage
Published in Electoral Studies, 2013
This paper analyses government approval in Italy – which has become a key aspect for electoral support in the new party system of the Second Republic – exploring the influence that TV coverage exerts on approval net of traditional accounts of government support. Relying on both aggregate time series and pooled individual-level surveys analyses, it is shown that communication has a sizeable impact on government approval. The popularity of Centre-Left and Centre-Right governments is affected evenly by the economy but differently by the news coverage of their activity. People with lower political interest are the most reactive to news coverage of government performance. Read more
Recommended citation: Bellucci, P. and De Angelis, A. (2013). Government approval in Italy: Political cycle, economic expectations and TV coverage. Electoral Studies, Vol. 32(3): 452-459. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379413000644