📌 Main Argument

This article argues that individuals who support a stigmatized party face incentives to hide that preference. Political stigma is defined as a situation in which people perceive social norms against a political preference, and those perceived norms can reshape both public behavior and private responses.

🔎 How Stigma Is Defined and Theorized

Theoretical discussion clarifies political stigma as a social-norms phenomenon: when a preference is perceived as socially disapproved, supporters anticipate social costs and may conceal their true choice.

📊 Natural Experiment: Public Voting in a Spanish Region

• Case: A Spanish region in which voting was made public in one election, creating variation in the observability of votes.
• Qualitative evidence indicates many voters felt their choices could be observed in that election.
• Identification: Triple-differences models compare changes in support where voting was observable versus not, isolating the effect of observability on party support.

📈 Key Findings

• Observability reduced votes for Partido Popular (PP), a party identified as stigmatized in the country.
• At the individual level, PP supporters took more steps to keep their vote secret when observability was possible.
• Those who exerted more effort to hide their vote also reported greater discomfort answering political surveys, suggesting parallel effects on survey response and preference expression.

💡 Why It Matters

• Demonstrates that social norms and stigma can produce preference falsification in real-world voting contexts.
• Highlights that changes in voting procedures (e.g., making votes observable) can alter measured support for parties and affect the reliability of survey responses.
• Results emphasize the role of social pressures as predictors of political behavior and have implications for interpreting electoral outcomes and survey-based measures of public opinion.