Introduction Lorenzo De Sio, Vincenzo Emanuele and Nicola Maggini Part 1 – Before the elections Towards the European elections: An introductory framework Vincenzo Emanuele and Nicola Maggini Life of EP: History of the empowerment of the European Parliament Rocco Polin The evolution of turnout in European elections from 1979 to 2009 Nicola Maggini Proportional representation with variable-geometry: Here is how to vote in the 28 member states Vincenzo Emanuele Europarties’ choices—Who are the candidates for the presidency of the European Commission and how have they been selected? Bruno Marino Expansion and electoral success: The winning strategy of the EPP Vincenzo Emanuele United but loser? The PES between party cohesion and electoral decline Michail Schwartz The Alliance...

As witnessed by the emphasis and the media coverage of pundits and journalists from all over Europe, the French Presidential election (first round on April 23rd) can potentially be crossroad in European history. Indeed, in an increasingly unpredictable international context, France’s right-wing and left-wing anti-establishment and Eurosceptic forces are rising at the expense of traditional mainstream parties. Opinion polls have not only put Marine Le Pen in the first position of the first round since the beginning of the campaign, for the first time the leader of the Front National seems to be competitive in the second round. Moreover,...

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...

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 eighth Spanish European Parliament Election (EPE) marked the end of an electoral cycle that began one month before (on April 26th, 2019) with the General Election in which the incumbent Socialist Party (PSOE) won a plurality of seats. However, at the time of the EPE a parliamentary agreement to elect a new national government had not been reached yet, since most parties were eager to postpone this decision until after the election. On top of that, during the EPE campaign Catalan politicians who had organized an independence referendum on October 2017 and ran as candidates in the General...