Conditionné.e.s aux réformes intra-partisanes ? : Vers une approche psychologique des dynamiques partisanes

Party reforms have been increasingly scrutinised as the symbol of parties’ resilience to their predicted decline. The literature has traditionally treated reforms as the results of contextual shocks to which party elites must respond to improve the party. Yet little is known about the elites’ actual rationale. Even more puzzling, no study so far has looked at citizens’ perceptions and preferences toward party reforms, even though reforms are usually designed to appeal to supporters and voters to enable the party to regain strength and legitimacy. This project provides a constructivist variant to the literature by studying the determinants of how individuals perceive (the causes of) party reforms and how it influences their preferences. Individual-level determinants and the predictive power of psychological characteristics will be investigated in particular. Understanding how individuals process their political environment and how differences in who they are influence their political behaviour is crucial to examine the sources of the current democratic malaise. Similarly, the question of party elites’ and citizens’ perceptions and preferences (mis)alignment at the aggregated level is of primary importance. Pursuing reform strategies disconnected from citizens’ demands might lead elites to fail to narrow the democratic deficit and eventually could contribute to widening the gap between party elites and citizens. This project proposes investigating these questions by implementing an experimental design based on a gamified ‘vignette’ survey. Experimental methods provide cost-effective ways to disentangle the effect of isolated variables of interest and to subject respondents to dynamic stimuli over which the researcher has full control. This project will lead, for the first time applied to party reforms, to a coherent account of the influence of psychological traits on individuals’ political preferences.