📌 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.
