Next Sunday, French voters will be called to the polls for the first round of the Presidential elections. During the final days of the electoral campaign, we want to provide a meaningful overview and interpretation of the structure of issue competition in the French system. To this purpose, CISE has collected an original dataset through CAWI interviews on a representative sample of the French voting-age population. In particular, in this article we focus on the candidates’ credibility on different issues. Our data includes a set of nine valence issues, on which there is by definition a consensual agreement (Stokes 1963)....

Dr. Alistair Clark Newcastle University Alistair.clark@ncl.ac.uk The UK goes to the polls on the 7th May 2015 in what is widely expected to be the tightest and most uncertain general election contest since the 1970s. Like many other countries, the UK is facing a highly sceptical and volatile electorate, a populist right-wing insurgency, pressure from secessionists and the breakdown of what many comparative scholars have long held to be a defining characteristic of British politics, the two-party system.  There are a number of things that are likely to be major issues in the election. Six of the most important are as follows. No...

Aldo Paparo & Lorenzo De Sio (2017) PTV gap as a new measure of partisanship: a panel-data, multi-measure validation showing surprising partisanship stability, Contemporary Italian Politics, 9:1, 60-83, DOI: 10.1080/23248823.2017.1289733 Aldo Paparo, interviewed by Andrea Maccagno (English translation by Elisabetta Mannoni) The basic concept your paper starts from is party identification. What does it mean? CISE Interviews are aimed at spreading CISE research activities, which yield scientific publications in national and international journals. Their format, as an interview to a young CISE intern, allows to present publication contents in a simple form, overcoming difficulties of technical language and often complex statistical tools. The idea of...

The context During the last five years, Portugal has been regarded as a successful case in the European context from both an economic and political point of view (see Fernandes et al, 2018). On the one hand, the country has turned the page on its 2011-2014 crisis, when a financial assistance programme was implemented with painful austerity policies. On the other hand, unlike other Southern European countries, Portugal’s party system has proved to be very resilient. Although mainstream parties have struggled to retain their electoral support, the Socialist Party (PS, Partido Socialista) and the Social Democratic Party (PSD, Partido Social...

Dr. Alistair Clark, Newcastle University E: Alistair.clark@ncl.ac.uk T: @ClarkAlistairJ In my earlier blog for CISE on the UK’s 2015 general election, I noted how uncertain the polls were, with none of the two main British parties – Conservative or Labour - able to make a decisive break prior to polling day. I ended by suggesting that there was likely to be an investigation into the polling industry after election day. One of those predictions came true. Unfortunately for the reputation of political science predictions, it was that there will be an inquiry into the performance of the polling industry. Expectations were of a hung...