The year of challengers? Issues, public opinion, and elections in Western Europe in 2017 edited by Lorenzo De Sio and Aldo Paparo Within the seven-month period going from mid-March to mid-October of 2017, five Western-European democracies held their general elections: the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Austria. This provided an exceptional opportunity to study public opinion structures in these countries in the particularly turbulent context that followed disruptive electoral developments such as the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. To exploit this opportunity, the CISE launched an innovative comparative research project to empirically assess before the elections the preferences of...

Alessandro Chiaramonte, Vincenzo Emanuele, Nicola Maggini, Aldo Paparo, Populist Success in a Hung Parliament: The 2018 General Election in Italy, South European Society and Politics, DOI:10.1080/13608746.2018.1506513. ABSTRACT The 2018 Italian general elections were a crucial test to assess the resilience of mainstream parties vis-à-vis the challenge provided by populist forces and the stabilisation of the tripolar party system emerged in 2013. The article analyses the outcome of the election, whose most remarkable result was the unprecedented success of two populist parties, the M5S and the Lega, by focusing on key aspects such as the new electoral system, the coalition-building process, the electoral...