Expressive voting with booing and cheering: Evidence from Britain

Abstract

Previous work on Expressive Voting has focused on the desire of voters to express what they are for and thus who they are. But, often also as important, is the desire of voters to express what they are against, and who they are not. In this paper we extend the standard formulation of Expressive Voting to account for this possibility. Using data for the UK we find empirical evidence that the desire to boo has been increasingly important at recent elections. The implications of this for recent trends in political polarization are discussed.