how democracies generate norms against behavior associated with authoritarianism, how those norms are sustained, and how they erode. He also has a keen interest in political methodology, especially causal inference methods. His work has been published in journals including Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies.
Valentim applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Normalization of the Radical Right: A Norms Theory of Political Supply and Demand, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Normalization of the Radical Right is a half-page that closes Chapter 4. This chapter discusses the difficulties of measuring some of the key concepts in the book—like social norms and preference falsification—and proposes a measure with which to do so. This, called reported vote, consists of comparing the official vote share for a given party that is declared in post-electoral surveys. The rationale is that voting is private and, as such, it should not be very affected by perceptions of what is acceptable. However, admitting one’s vote is a social interaction, and thus likely to be affected by perceptions of what others think is desirable and acceptable. The implication is that, if a given political party is stigmatized, there will be individuals who vote for it but do not admit having done so—resulting in the party being under-reported in post-electoral surveys.Visit Vicente Valentim's website.
In this specific page, I discuss how a similar approach can be used in future work, and then circle back to the main argument of the book:This approach can be followed in subsequent studies interested in studying normative influences. If they are interested in political stigma per se, they can use reported vote as a measure of it. If they are interested in other outcomes, they can use the broader approach discussed in the previous section to apply this logic to other behaviors of interest.Given that this only a half page and that it is part of the chapter dealing with measurement, readers skipping to page 99 would unfortunately miss much of the core argument of the book. Such argument is twofold: first, more generally, that social norms are a crucial driver of political behavior; second, more specifically, that social norms are central to understand one of the main important political developments of recent years: the rise of radical-right parties and politicians.
The goal of this chapter has been to discuss reported vote and its underlying logic, since it is crucial to many analyses throughout the book. In the following chapters, I return to the theory of normalization discussed in Chapter 3. Using the approaches discussed in this chapter, I now test observable implications of that theory empirically.
I hope this blog post makes readers curious to look into this and other sections of the book!
--Marshal Zeringue