Anti-elite attitudes and support for independent candidates.

The ideological dispute between left and right has dominated the political discussion for decades in multiple countries across the globe. However, in recent years people vs. elite debates have replaced traditional ideological conflicts in explaining voters' electoral decisions. In this paper, we investigate whether anti-elite attitudes contribute to a key political outcome: the increase in successful independent candidates. We implement a conjoint experiment in Chile, where anti-elite sentiments and the number of successful independent politicians are currently prominent. We find that preferences for independent candidates largely increase among voters with anti-elite orientations. In a context where traditional parties face difficult times, such beliefs are key to understanding the factors behind support for candidates with no party affiliation. This insight is important because electing independent politicians can promote a personalistic style of politics, undermine democratic accountability, and foster conflict between the executive and legislative branches.

Informations de copyright

Copyright: © 2023 Argote, Visconti. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.