Political Involvement and Electoral Competition

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Lorenzo De Sio

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To cite the article:

De Sio, L. (2006). Political Involvement and Electoral Competition. Center for the Study of Democracy – University of California, Irvine.

Abstract

Recent literature highlights how political knowledge and involvement matter for most political attitudes. Political involvement is here proposed as a second “spatial” dimension, orthogonally complementing left-right ideological positions of citizens. In such a space, a logical quantitative model is developed, hypothesizing that more involved citizens cast votes in a heavily structured manner, strongly connected to their overall ideological orientation, while less involved citizens present higher probabilities of voting for a party that apparently contradicts their self-declared ideological orientation. This logical quantitative model is then applied to data from the Italian National Election Studies 2001 survey. Results confirm the hypothesis, and show that the “competitive area”, where voting probabilities are similar for both major blocs, is spatially quite narrow for very involved citizens, and significantly “widens” as the level of involvement decreases. Separate analyses are then carried out for different geo-political areas of the country, with interesting results.

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Lorenzo De Sio

Lorenzo De Sio è professore ordinario di Scienza Politica presso la LUISS Guido Carli, e direttore del CISE – Centro Italiano di Studi Elettorali. Già Jean Monnet Fellow presso lo European University Institute, Visiting Research Fellow presso la University of California, Irvine, e Campbell National Fellow presso la Stanford University, è membro di ITANES (Italian National Election Studies), ha partecipato a vari progetti di ricerca internazionali, tra cui “The True European Voter”(ESF-COST Action IS0806), the “EU Profiler” (2009) e EUandI (2014), e di recente ha dato vita al progetto ICCP (Issue Competition Comparative Project). I suoi interessi di ricerca attuali vertono sull’analisi quantitativa dei comportamenti di voto e delle strategie di partito in prospettiva comparata, con particolare attenzione al ruolo delle issues. Tra le sue pubblicazioni, accanto a vari volumi in italiano e in inglese, ci sono articoli apparsi su American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, Party Politics, West European Politics, South European Society and Politics, oltre che su numerose riviste scientifiche italiane. Clicca qui per accedere al profilo su IRIS.