Pre-Analysis Plan
Over the last two decades, party system fragmentation has dramatically increased in Western democracies (Chiaramonte & Emanuele, 2019; Emanuele & Chiaramonte, 2018, 2019). This change has not come alone. On the contrary, polarization and dissatisfaction with the democratic process are arguably on the rise too (Boxell et al., 2020; Martini & Quaranta, 2020). This project links both phenomena by analyzing the attitudinal correlates of new party voting and the effect of electoral results on attitude change when a new party enters. To do so, it leverages the unique context of the 2022 French presidential election, where a new far-right challenger (the novel candidate Éric Zemmour) is likely to obtain sizeable electoral support. The study consists of a two-wave panel survey among potential right-wing voters before and after the 1st round of the election. Its goal is two-fold. First, the pre-electoral wave aims to disentangle the correlates of new party voting when more than one viable options is available within the same ideological space. Second, the post-electoral wave allows us to analyse pre-post election attitude change. An additional survey experiment assesses the effect of electoral information frames on satisfaction with democracy (SWD), political trust and efficacy among new party supporters.