Vincenzo Emanuele, Lorenzo De Sio and Mathilde van Ditmars Falling in a Western European context of increasing electoral unpredictability and party system change (Chiaramonte and Emanuele 2015), the upcoming elections in The Netherlands are receiving a lot of media attention in the international press, as it is the first of a range of upcoming European elections (before France and Germany) that are expected to mark the future of European politics. Consistently with an international context where right-wing populism is on the rise, with the election of Donald Trump and the candidature of Marine le Pen, in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ party...

Few days before the general election in Spain, some surprising evidence emerges from the ICCP (Issue Competition Comparative Project) pre-electoral survey: what we could call a return of ideological polarization; and along classic lines of conflict that have characterized the Spanish party system in past decades. In a nutshell, this is due to the relevance of relatively new parties such as Podemos and Vox, whose constituencies appear ideologically consistent in terms of left-wing or right-wing stances across multiple issues. This sets these Spanish parties apart from other recent challenger parties in other European countries, which mix and match both...

Building on the tools provided by issue yield theory (De Sio and Weber 2014), this analysis looks at the data collected by CISE through a CAWI survey launched a few weeks before the first round of the French presidential election. We rely here on an innovative measurement of positional issues, which provides a common issue yield index for this type of issues. Positional issues are, in general, defined by reference to two rival goals (e.g. progressive vs. traditional morality): the issue yield measure assesses the presence of related strategic issue opportunities for a party or a candidate. The core dimensions originally...

To cite the article: Emanuele, V. (2023), 'Class cleavage electoral structuring in Western Europe (1871–2020)', European Journal of Political Research, DOI:10.1111/1475-6765.12608. The article, published on European Journal of Political Research, can be accessed here. Abstract Despite the huge amount of studies on cleavages, scholars have never elaborated a dynamic model to conceptualize and measure the stages of electoral development of the class cleavage and, specifically, the stage corresponding to its full electoral structuring. To fill this gap, by combining some key electoral properties of...

  Introduction The Netherlands and the United Kingdom were the first member states to hold European elections on Thursday 23 May 2019 ahead of other European Union (EU) member states which followed on 24 May or later. One may have expected that the Netherlands and the UK would set a ‘Eurosceptic’ cast over the EP elections to be held in the remaining 26 EU member states but this was not the case for the Netherlands. Actually, quite the opposite happened. The big winner was the pro-EU Labour Party (PvdA) which won the largest vote share of 18.9 per cent, up 9.5...