On the 15th of October 2017, Austrian voters are called to the polls to elect a new parliament (Nationalrat). The snap elections were called immediately after Sebastian Kurz, the 31-year-old minister of foreign affairs succeeded Reinhold Mitterlehner as leader of the Christian democratic People’ s Party (ÖVP) in May 2017. Kurz’s leadership and a new party brand (“The new People’s party”) lead to an enormous ascent in the polls for the party. As of today, less than a week before the election, Kurz’s way to the Austrian chancellorship appears to be rather sure. Sebastian Kurz was successful in establishing himself...

Lorenzo De Sio Party systems across the Western world appear increasingly challenged. After the 1990s and 2000s saw the prevalence of a two-bloc (or two-party) competition by mainstream parties with relatively similar, moderate policies, recent years have seen an unprecedented emergence of successful challenger parties (and leaders), with examples both on the right-wing (e.g. Donald Trump, the UKIP, the Front National) and on the left wing (e.g. Bernie Sanders, SYRIZA, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn and Benoît Hamon). Such new, challenger parties and leaders share instead a conflictual emphasis on a relatively small set of controversial policy issues that have proved electorally...

The long-awaited first round of French presidential election is now history. Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen will be on the second-round ballot, as recent surveys had predicted. In a two-week time, French electors will be again called to the polls to choose between the two the resident in the Élysée Palace for the next five years. (Zolpidem) How is this going to end? The French case is the paradigm of two-round systems, where the crucial determinant lies in the second preferences of those who at the first round voted for someone not admitted to the second round. In this specific case,...

  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...

Nicola Maggini, Lorenzo De Sio and Mathilde van Ditmars Following on the tools provided by issue yield theory (De Sio and Weber 2014), this analysis provides a specific perspective on the data we at CISE collected through a CAWI survey few weeks before the Dutch election. We rely here on an innovative measurement of positional issues, which allows to derive a common issue yield index for this kind of issues. Positional issues are, in general, defined by reference to two rival goals (e.g. progressive vs. traditional morality): the issue yield measure permits us to assess the presence of strategic issue opportunities for a...