%0 Journal Article
%T How protest voters choose
%A James Dennison
%A Sarah Birch
%J Party Politics
%@ 1460-3683
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1354068817698857
%X Political scientists have identified protest voting ¨C voting for an anti-establishment party as a protest against mainstream politics ¨C as a consequence of dissatisfaction with traditional political options. Yet we know little about what motivates people to cast a protest vote or why voters select one such protest option over another. Taking as its empirical referent the 2015 General Election in Great Britain, this article assesses the ¡®protest choice¡¯ in parliamentary democracies. We test three possible theoretical explanations for protest voting: ideology, mistrust of political elites and campaign effects. We find that the most important factors affecting protest choice are issue positions and campaign effects. The findings suggest that protest voting is a complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to knee-jerk anti-politics reactions
%K electoral behaviour
%K Green Party of England and Wales
%K protest voting
%K United Kingdom
%K UK Independence Party
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1354068817698857