Louis, Philippos and Troumpounis, Orestis and Tsakas, Nikolaos and Xefteris, Dimitrios (2020) Protest voting in the laboratory. Working Paper. Lancaster University, Department of Economics, Lancaster.
![[thumbnail of LancasterWP2020_002]](https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/style/images/fileicons/text.png)
Abstract
Formal analysis predicts that the likelihood of an electoral accident depends on the preference intensity for a successful protest, but not on the protest's popularity: an increase in protest's popularity is fully offset by a reduction in the individual probability of casting a protest vote. By conducting the first laboratory experiment on protest voting, we find strong evidence in favor of the first prediction and qualified support for the latter. While the offset effect is present, it is not as strong as the theory predicts: protest candidates gain both by fanaticising existing protesters and by expanding the protest's popular base.