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.
Lorenzo De Sio
Lorenzo De Sio è Professore Ordinario di Scienza Politica alla Luiss, dove dirige il [CISE – Centro Italiano Studi Elettorali](https://cise.luiss.it) e co-dirige il Luiss Research Center on Democracy. È co-direttore (con Mark Thatcher) della Laurea Magistrale bilingue in “Government & Public Affairs” (GPA) e co-direttore (con Sylvia Kritzinger) della [Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica](https://www.rivisteweb.it/issn/0048-8402) (WOS Q2). Ha trascorso periodi di ricerca presso la University of California Irvine, l’European University Institute (Jean Monnet Fellow), la Stanford University (Campbell National Fellow) e SciencesPo Paris. La sua ricerca si concentra su analisi quantitative dell’opinione pubblica, comportamento di voto e competizione partitica. Tra i progetti di cui è stato Principal Investigator: l’Issue Competition Comparative Project (ICCP) e POSTGEN. Si occupa inoltre di infrastrutture di ricerca: ha diretto lo sviluppo del software [DAX](https://dax.luiss.it) nell’ambito di [FOSSR](https://fossr.eu) (PNRR) ed è Direttore del Service Center for Platform Design and Development nell’infrastruttura internazionale [MEDem](https://medem-research.eu). I suoi lavori sono pubblicati su riviste come *American Political Science Review*, *Comparative Political Studies*, *Electoral Studies*, *Party Politics*, *Political Psychology* e *West European Politics*. Il suo ultimo volume è **Democrazia addio** (Laterza, 2026).
