15:30 - 17:45
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Jeffrey Nonnemacher
Discussant/s:
Jens Wäckerle
Meeting Room Q

Sebastian Block, Martin Gross, Dominic Nyhuis, Jan Velimsky
How political context homogenizes the representation of social groups: Evidence from parliamentary questions at the local level in Germany

Guilherme Arbache
From electoral supply to voter perceptions: a new framework to understand ideological congruence between people and representatives

Jeffrey Nonnemacher
Representational Deprivation: Niche Parties, Niche Voters and Political Protest
Representational Deprivation: Niche Parties, Niche Voters and Political Protest
Jeffrey Nonnemacher
University of Pittsburgh

Political participation has increasingly taken unconventional forms in advanced democracies. At the same time, the traditional party systems of Europe have been upended by the recent emergence of successful niche parties challenging the status quo. While some studies have examined partisanship and protest, we still lack a theoretical framework that ties niche party voters to political protest. In this paper, I argue that niche party voters are more likely to protest than mainstream party voters, especially in cases where they are dissatisfied with the government’s representation of their positions on the issues of immigration and climate change. I then test the theory of representational deprivation, or the sense that the government is not adequately representing the issues the voter cares about, using all nine waves of the European Social Survey in Western Europe. The findings have important implications for understanding the conditions under which people engage in political protest, especially voters of niche parties.