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,...

On the next 8th June, UK voters will be faced with a decisive election, which could have a profound impact not only on British internal affairs but also on the Brexit negotiations with the European Union. Beyond the analysis of the UK public opinion and political parties, derived from the original survey conducted by the CISE, a matter that requires further investigation and has been gaining increasing attention by pundits and the media is surely the forecasting of the composition of the next House of Commons.  In the past few days, more and more experts have been underlying that the...

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...

In view of the next general election in Britain, to be held next 8th June, the CISE (Italian Center for Electoral Studies) has conducted a CAWI survey on the adult British population. Similarly to what we have recently done before the Dutch parliamentary election last March and the French Presidential election last April, British respondents were asked to express their support on 18 positional issues (divisive issues that refer to two rival goals, e.g. public spending vs. tax cuts). Specifically, each respondent was asked to position himself/herself on a 6-point scale where the points 1 and 6 represent the...

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...