The Issue Yield model predicts that parties will choose specific issues to emphasise, based on the joint assessment of electoral risks (how divisive is an issue within the party support base) and electoral opportunities (how widely supported is the same issue outside the party). According to this model, issues with high yield are those that combine a high affinity with the existing party base, together with a high potential to reach new voters. In previous work, the model showed a remarkable ability to explain aggregate issue importance as reported by party supporters, as well as issue emphasis in party manifestos. This paper tests the implications at the individual level by comparing a conventional model where issue salience is determined from manifesto data with a revised model where issue salience is determined by issue yield. The empirical findings show that issue yield is a more effective criterion than manifesto emphasis for identifying the issues most closely associated with party support in the minds of voters.

Operationalizations of the Rokkanian centre-periphery cleavage have traditionally focused on the presence of specific regional political cultures, as well as on cultural fragmentation within a country (at the aggregate level) or on proxy indicators such as town size (at the individual level). We suggest that geographical remoteness from political centres – a key element of the centre-periphery cleavage in the Rokkanian framework – could provide a more accurate measurement of the subjective position of individuals in relationship to the cleavage. As new indicators of this concept, we introduce measures of distance between the place of residence of a citizen and political centres at different hierarchical levels, based on road distances and travel times along traditional roads (also accounting for differences in orography and geography among different countries and regions). We empirically test the impact of such indicators on vote choice on the Italian and French cases. We use survey data from the 2006 ITANES and the 2002 PEF, and information about road distances and travel times obtained through online mapping/routing services. We first assess differences between the two countries in terms of orography and geography. We then estimate multivariate models of vote choice at the individual level, in order to te st the following hypotheses: a) that the new indicators add significant explanatory power, compared to traditional indicators related to the centre-periphery cleavage; b) that the new indicators have different effects on vote choice for different parties, expressing different affinities of these parties with the cleavage.

CHIARAMONTE, A. C. A., & D’Alimonte, R. (2013). Sistemi elettorali. In G. Pasquino, M. Regalia, & M. Valbruzzi (Eds.), Quarant’anni di scienza politica in Italia (pp. 121–136). BOLOGNA: Il Mulino.

-. (2000). Il maggioritario regionale. Le elezioni del 16 aprile 2000.