The Normative Implications of Negative Voting

In this chapter, we engage with the normative implications of negative voting for democratic representation. Is negative voting necessarily bad for democracy? We address these issues through two exercises. First, we simulate the outcome of the elections under analysis had nobody cast a negative vote, to get a sense of the impact of negative voting on election outcomes. Second, we compare negative voters with abstainers, to understand to what extent do the two groups differ, and whether negative voting could be understood as an intermediate step in the direction of abstention. The results provide a more nuanced outlook on the perniciousness of negative voting for democratic elections.