Nel corso degli ultimi 20 anni il sistema partitico del nostro paese è stato attraversato da profondi mutamenti. Dopo la lunga stagione del pluralismo estremo e polarizzato degli anni della Prima Repubblica, a partire dal 1994 si è progressivamente mosso verso un sistema bipolare con alternanza caratterizzato da alti livelli di frammentazione e discontinuità dell’offerta politica, fino alla svolta quasi-bipartitica delle elezioni del 2008. Il capitolo ha l’obiettivo di analizzare il cambiamento del sistema partitico italiano avvenuto con le elezioni del 2013 dalle quali è emerso un sistema sostanzialmente tripolare che ha stravolto l’assetto bipolare precedente in un quadro di crescente destrutturazione e di fluidità elettorale che ha pochi eguali nella storia elettorale dell’Europa occidentale. Quali sono le caratteristiche del nuovo sistema partitico italiano? Quali fattori lo hanno determinato? Cosa spiega la sua perenne instabilità? Servendosi di molteplici indicatori e attraverso un approccio empirico e attento alla comparazione con altri casi europei il capitolo cercherà di dare risposta a questi interrogativi.

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.

This article has the purpose to assess if and how party system nationalization affects individual voting behaviour. Previous studies on party system nationalization have focused on systemic processes, exclusively dealing with aggregate data. The authors address this topic from a new empirical perspective, arguing that party system nationalization could act as a context dimension interacting with the vote choice function. How does this specific context dimension moderate the explanatory power of individual level characteristics? On which determinants of vote choice does party system nationalization have a greater impact? To answer these questions, the authors focus on 23 European countries through the use of the 2009 European Election Study. The empirical analysis shows that in nationalized contexts the impact of the left-right dimension on party support is higher than in territorialized contexts, while that of class as well as of culture-related variables is lower. The authors also discuss the implications of these findings.

Lorenzo De Sio, Mark N. Franklin, Till Weber, The risks and opportunities of Europe: How issue yield explains (non-)reactions to the financial crisis, Electoral Studies, Volume 44, December 2016, Pages 483-491, ISSN 0261-3794, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2016.06.006. Abstract The financial crisis subjected the EU to its first truly serious stress test. A majority of citizens is now opposed to further integration. But party systems have barely adjusted, instead perpetuating traditional patterns of an evasive mainstream with Euroskeptic fringes. To explain this unexpected outcome we draw on issue yield (De Sio and Weber, 2014), a general model of political competition that unites public opinion, party...

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