De Sio, L., & Cataldi, M. (2014). Tanto tuonò che piovve: Il risultato delle elezioni. In Terremoto elettorale. Le elezioni politiche del 2013 (pp. 97–128). Bologna: Il Mulino.

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.

This article aims to rediscover a variable that has been rather neglected by the Italian electoral studies on the so called «Second Republic»: demographic size of municipalities. Is there a difference between a citizen who votes in a small municipality of North-east and another one who votes in Milan? Between voting in a rural village or in an urban metropolis? In other words, is territory – considered as centrality or peripherality of the municipality where vote is cast – important to understand Italians’ electoral choices? And if so, how much it matters? May it even become a decisive dimension for the electoral results? Moving from these questions, the article analyzes the results of 2008 Italian general election by dividing the more than 8.000 Italian municipalities in 5 classes of demographic size (0-5.000, 5.001-15.000, 15.001-50.000, 50.001-100.000, above 100.000) and the territory of our country in 4 geo-political sub-units (North-west, North-east, Red belt and South) in order to develop a complete mapping of the incidence of demographic variable on the vote. This study concerns the 2008 vote to main Italian parties, coalitions and electoral blocs and uses the analysis of variance to calculate the tightness of the association between the above variable and the vote through a synthetic index. The findings are very interesting and in some ways surprising. Demographic size matters, especially in some areas (North) and for some parties (Northern League, Pd, Udc, Idv). In particular, three possible behaviours occur: some parties, definable as «city oriented», tends to achieve increasing electoral results whenever the size of municipality grows (eg. Pd, Idv); other parties, labelled as «village oriented», show an opposite trend, that is strongly rooted in small towns and a systematic loss of votes when demographic size increases (Northern League, Udc); the third type of behaviour is given by some «all around» political forces (Pdl, La Destra, Mpa) that show indifference to the variable. An even more pronounced effect could be found in coalitions and blocs analysis, with the centre-left collecting a strictly urban vote and the centre-right stronger in small towns.

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

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.