Italy was among the countries going to the polls on Sunday, 26 May. The electoral system provides for five constituencies, which however are not relevant for seat allocation among parties, as this is done merely on the basis of votes received nationwide. Furthermore, there is a 4% legal threshold. In addition to the European Parliament (EP) elections, municipal elections were held just under half of 7,915 Italian municipalities – involving roughly a third of Italian voters. Campaign and competitors In June 2018, after the non-decisive results of the general elections held in March 2018, the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the...

(English translation by Elisabetta Mannoni) Matteo Renzi won the primaries of the Democratic Party, with an outstanding result (70%) with respect to his two adversaries, the current Minister of Justice Andrea Orlando (19,5%) and the governor of Apulia Michele Emiliano (10,5%). A wide gap between the first and the second (50,5 percentage points), yet coherent with the gap registered in the previous primaries, between Renzi and Gianni Cuperlo (49,8). We can then confirm on the electorate what had already emerged in the vote by party members, held a few weeks ago: a dominant ex-Prime Minister over the other main competitors and a...

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)....

A multidisciplinary seminar series for empirical research on democratic representation The CISE (Italian Center for Electoral Studies) organizes a seminar series articulated on a weekly basis. The first series of seminars will run, on an experimental weekly basis, in November and December 2018. It was born from: the need and interest of the CISE to establish a practice of open discussion for the work in progress of its researchers; the aim to establish and consolidate a network of scientific interaction relating the CISE within the LUISS research community (both in the Department of Political Science and in other departments) and with...

Riproduciamo qui tradotto un articolo apparso oggi sul blog EUROPP della London School of Economics(traduzione di Federico Trastulli) Le elezioni presidenziali americane del 3 novembre saranno seguite dall'Europa con grande intersse. Basandosi su recenti dati di sondaggio originali, Davide Angelucci, Lorenzo De Sio, Morris P. Fiorina e Mark N. Franklin illustrano la sfida che attende Donald Trump nel suo tentativo di rielezione. Al momento non ci sono temi divisivi su cui Trump si trova a ottenere più sostegno da indipendenti e democratici di quanto non possa perdere dalla sua stessa base elettorale; mentre...