Measuring Negative Voting in Democratic Elections

We discuss issues related with the measurement of negative voting in multi-party democracies. Using proxies of negative voting questions from pre-existent data sources, we are able to get a rough sense of the relevance of negative voting in different elections. Nonetheless, the limited availability of these items across countries hinders comparative analyses. Most importantly, concerns regarding measurement equivalence across elections make these suboptimal instruments for the purposes of this study.