Research
ON-GOING PROJECTS
DeVOTE ERC StG grant project (2021-ongoing): the aim is to examine the meanings of ‘voting’ for ordinary citizens, their causes and consequences in both established democracies and electoral autocracies. The project started in January 2021 and will last 5 years. The central aims of DeVOTE are to (1) understand what ‘voting’ means for ordinary citizens, (2) examine the variation of ‘voting’ meanings across individuals and across countries, (3) study how elections create and modify these ‘voting’ meanings and (4) investigate the consequences of ‘voting’ meanings for citizens’ preferences, attitudes and their political behaviours. Visit the project website for updated information, all related activities and to check how can you be involved in the project!
WWTF Digital Humanism grant project (2024-ongoing): the aim is to understand citizen preferences for democratic innovation, in particular within the context of participatory budgeting algorithms (together with Jan Maly).
COMPLETED PROJECTS
FWF Austrian Science Fund Hertha Firnberg project (completed in 2023): studied how citizens respond to the compromises parties need to make to form governments and pass legislation in parliaments.
RECONNECT H2020 project (completed in 2022): WP9 studied citizen perceptions of democracy and rule of law in the EU, examining whether elite discourse resonates at the citizen level and how citizens react to EU reform scenarios. The work package mapped country-level and individual-level differences in attitudes toward EU reform options. It aimed to understand citizens’ ideal vision of the EU and identify factors explaining their preferences for institutional changes.
PAPERS CURRENTLY UNDER REVIEW
Plescia, Carolina, Ming M. Boyer, and Belén María Abdala. "Outgroup Vote Derogation: How People Make Sense of Outgroup Voting Behavior."
Partisans live in different areas, consume different sources of information, and often disagree on the very facts that they base their political opinions on. As a result, they are likely to misunderstand the political choices of opposing party supporters, including their votes. This paper introduces “outgroup vote derogation” to describe how partisans make sense of the voting behavior of opposing party supporters, and tests it in Brazil, Italy, and the USA, finding that it correlates with affective polarization and affects citizens’ satisfaction and acceptance of election outcomes, potentially threatening democratic stability.
Blais, André, Damien Bol, and Carolina Plescia. "Are Supporters of Democracy Good Losers?"
Regime legitimacy depends on citizens accepting unfavorable election results, with theories suggesting that pro-democratic individuals are more accepting of electoral losses. However, using data from a representative sample of Germans responding to hypothetical electoral outcomes, we find the opposite: stronger democratic convictions correlate with less electoral consent, particularly when partisan preferences are involved. This negative relationship persists even beyond reactions to the far-right AfD party, challenging assumptions about the link between democratic support and losers’ consent.
Faulí Molas, Clara, Carolina Plescia, Diego Garzia, and Frederico Ferreira Da Silva. "What does negative voting mean?"
This study examines the nature of negative voting by investigating whether it is driven primarily by expressive or instrumental considerations. The analysis uses as a case study the 2024 European Parliament elections conducted simultaneously across the EU. It uses originally collected post-election survey data from seven countries (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland) and a new survey instrument. The results show that negative voting has a low prevalence and contains both instrumental and expressive components, but it is generally more instrumental than expressive compared to positive voting.
Abdala, M. Belén, and Carolina Plescia . "Why do people run for office? Exploring the political motivations of first-time candidates."
Descriptively, office holders tend to represent a select few, often missing the broader diversity of the population. This raises a crucial question in the study of political representation: why do (some) individuals decide to run for office? While prior research has extensively examined political ambition and candidate emergence, most studies have focused on those already in the race or relied on hypothetical scenarios using convenient samples. To advance the discussion on what motivates people to run for office, we examine the political motivations of first-time candidates in the context of a real election campaign.
Abdala, M. Belén, Carolina Plescia, and Markus Wagner. "Comparing Perceptions of Election Integrity: Challenges and Solutions for Measurement Equivalence in Global Surveys."
Researchers measuring election integrity perceptions across countries face the challenge of ensuring measurement equivalence between different national contexts. Using data from 13 countries and applying measurement invariance tests, this study finds promising cross-national comparability despite persistent between-country variation. The remaining differences likely reflect meaningful contextual variation rather than methodological problems.
WORKING PAPERS
Boyer, Ming M., and Carolina Plescia. "Against Voting: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Anti-Voting Meanings."
Paper presented at the 2025 European Political Science Association (EPSA) Annual Meeting, Madrid, Spain.
While much research examines what drives people to vote, this paper focuses on what citizens dislike about voting by analyzing responses from 23,828 citizens across 12 diverse countries who answered “what does ‘voting’ mean to you?” Using a mixed-methods approach, the study manually coded 1,775 negative responses through grounded theory to create a novel classification of anti-voting meanings, examining both existing interpretations (political efficacy, disillusionment) and new citizen-generated perspectives. The classification is then quantitatively analyzed against institutional and individual factors including societal position, country’s democratic level, and political preferences.
Abdala, M. Belén, Jennifer Oser, Carolina Plescia, and Aya Shoshan. "Decoding the Vote: Mapping Key Theories and Debates in the Study of Voting Behavior."
Paper presented at the 2025 Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) Annual Meeting, Chicago, USA.
Despite voting being central to political science and increasingly important due to declining turnout, the field lacks coherent understanding of what “voting” means, with competing civic duty, instrumental, and expressive definitions creating fragmented knowledge. This paper uses literature mapping tools from natural sciences to generate citation maps of academic research on voting, uncovering key themes, competing frameworks, and research gaps across different research streams. The methodology demonstrates the value of literature mapping for synthesizing complex theoretical landscapes in political science and provides suggestions for future research directions.
Ecker, Alejandro, Thomas, M. Meyer, and Carolina Plescia. "Does the bargaining clock tick? How time and rewards influence voter attitudes in coalition negotiations."
Wegschaider, Klaudia and Carolina Plescia. "Sharing the vote."
Paper presented at the Yale ISPS weekly internal seminar series.