Asked but not answered : on the contextual factors of not declaring a vote recall in a survey context. The case of the Italian General Election of 2013

As it is well known, a crucially sensitive topic of electoral surveys is related to voting behavior. Some respondents often try to avoid this kind of question by refusing to answer. Based on this premise, this paper tries to investigate to what extent such behavioral pattern is influenced by some contextual dynamics. Particular attention is paid here to the electoral composition of Italian neighbourhoods at the 2013 General Election. The main expectation, in fact, is that voters' propensity to silence their own choice depends, at least in part, on 'fear of social isolation' due to expressing a minority opinion in their local community. The present hypothesis is tested by means of some multi-level regressions, applied to the Itanes 2013 post-electoral survey and to election results aggregated at the polling station level.