Although the over-representation of working-class members among the electorates of Extreme Right Parties (ERPs) in Western Europe is well documented, previous studies have usually explained this pattern as a result of this voter group's changing political preferences. In contrast to these studies, this article argues that it is not the changing political preferences of the working class that lead them to vote for ERPs, but changes in the supply side of party competition that have caused the re-orientation of these voters from left-wing parties toward the extreme right. Differentiating between an economic and a cultural dimension of party competition, it is shown that both the policy options offered by parties to voters as the salience of the two issue-dimensions have changed dramatically over the last three decades. While the salience of economic issues as well as of party system polarization among these issues have declined in most Western European countries, the very opposite trend can be identified for non-economic issues, including the core issues of ERPs (for example, immigration, and law-and-order). These changes on the supply side of party competition cause working-class voters to base their vote decisions solely on their authoritarian, non-economic preferences and not – as in the past – on their left-wing economic demands. The theoretical assumptions are tested empirically with data from the Eurobarometer Trend File for the period from 1980 to 2002. In contexts where the economic dimension is more polarized or more salient than the cultural dimension, the positive impact of being a member of the working class on the vote decision for an ERP is significantly reduced.

In occasion of the European Parliament elections of 2014, EUDO launched euandi (reads: EU and I). The academic relevance of the euandi endeavour lies primarily in its choice to stick to the party positioning methodology already employed by the EU Profiler in 2009 as well as in the choice to keep as many policy items as possible in the 2014 questionnaire in order to allow cross-national, longitudinal research on party competition and voting behaviour in the EU across a five-year period. In this paper, we present the euandi project in a nutshell, the making of the questionnaire and the way in which political parties have been coded. Then, we illustrate the functioning of the application and the specifics of the resulting user dataset, comprising the opinions of 400.000 unique users that completed the euandi questionnaire during the six weeks preceding the EP elections of 2014.

Segnalazione bibliografica. Autore: Ruth Dassonneville Acta Politica 47, 18-41 (January 2012) Abstract In this article, we investigate voter volatility and analyse the causes and motives of switching vote intentions. We test two main sets of variables linked to volatility in literature; political sophistication and political disaffection. Results show that voters with low levels of political efficacy tend to switch more often, both within a campaign and between elections. In the analysis, we differentiate between campaign volatility and inter-election volatility, and by doing so show that the dynamics of a campaign have a profound impact on volatility. The campaign period is when the lowly...

De Sio, L. (2007). For a Few Votes More. The Italian General Elections of 2006. South European Society and Politics, 12(1), 95–109. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13608740601155534?journalCode=fses20 Vai al sito web