Introduction Contrary to the general European trend, the Maltese Labour Party won the European election held on the 25 May by a comfortable majority and took four of the six European parliament seats allotted to Malta. In 2014 it had also won a majority of votes, but only three seats (Carammia and Pace, 2015). The opposition Nationalist Party failed to arrest its electoral decline whose roots go back to 2004, but won the other two seats. As in the previous three European elections the Europhile parties won more than 96% of the valid votes cast. This is consistent with...

To cite the article: Emanuele, V. (2021). Lost in Translation? Class Cleavage Roots and Left Electoral Mobilization in Western Europe. Perspectives on Politics, 1-19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592721000943 The article is open access and can be accessed here Abstract I investigate whether the strength of the class cleavage in Western Europe still “translates” into the electoral mobilization of the left. This research question is addressed through comparative longitudinal analysis in nineteen Western European countries after World War II. In particular, the impact of class cleavage is investigated...

The campaign for the 2019 European Parliamentary election in the United Kingdom did not kick off until the last moment as the country’s government had not planned to take part in the election. The UK was originally scheduled to leave the European Union on the 29th of March, but extensions of Article 50 – the legal and political process for leaving the European Union – in late March and mid-April meant that the UK had to participate in the European Parliamentary elections under EU law. Despite this, it was not until the 7th of May that UK Prime Minister...

To cite the article: Emanuele, V., Marino, B., and Diodati, N. M. (2022) When institutions matter: electoral systems and intraparty fractionalization in Western Europe, Comparative European Politics, DOI: 10.1057/s41295-022-00319-z The article, published on Comparative European Politics, can be accessed here. Abstract The comparative study of intraparty divisions and their determinants has been a long-debated matter, but some issues remain unresolved. First, the problem of the empirical identification of intraparty groups. Second, the lack of comparative perspective and large-N cross-country and cross-time analyses, given intraparty divisions...

Recent electoral events (the Brexit referendum; Trump's victory) have testified a phenomenon that is increasingly relevant in recent elections: the presence of an information gap in the first hours after the end of the scrutiny. As first results start to flow in from specific local areas, uncertainty emerges. This is especially true when results come from areas with a particularly specific political tradition, so that the partial scrutiny is not representative of what might be the final result. This often produces a deep uncertainty, with relevant effects not only on public opinion and politicians' reactions, but also (an perhaps...