Emanuele, V. and Marino, B. (2016), 'Follow the candidates, not the parties? Personal vote in a regional de-institutionalised party system', Regional and Federal Studies Abstract This article analyses how personal vote shapes electoral competition and predicts electoral results in a regional de-institutionalized party system. After having analysed the connection between unpredictable political environment and personal vote, we build an original empirical model that explores preferential vote and patterns of re-candidacies and endorsements of the most voted candidates in the Calabrian regional elections. The analysis shows that leading candidates retain a more stable and predictable support over time with respect to parties...

CHIARAMONTE, A., & D’ALIMONTE, R. D. R. (2004). Dieci anni di (quasi) maggioritario. Una riforma (quasi) riuscita. In S. Ceccanti & S. Vassallo (Eds.), Come chiudere la transizione. Cambiamento, apprendimento e adattamento nel sistema politic...

De Sio, L. (2009). Oltre il modello di Goodman. La stima dei flussi elettorali in base a dati aggregati. Polena, 9–35.

In 2011 Italian local elections we observed high electoral mobility: in Milan, for example, the center-left gained his first-time victory in the Berlusconi era, while in Naples there was a significant split voting in the first round and a huge turnaround between the first and the second ballot. A general research question emerged: are the shifts in the results understandable trough a left-right axis (political nature hypothesis of these elections) or were there cross-cutting mechanisms (local nature hypothesis of the elections with a strong role of personal aspects)? To answer the question we analyze the voting ecological estimates in the three biggest cities involved in 2011 elections: Milan, Naples and Turin. For every matrix we generated the estimates both applying the traditional Goodman model (for the whole city and splitting by district) and the hierarchical multinomial-dirichlet model developed by Rosen, Jiang, King and Taner. The most important result of our study is the strong political polarization of the vote in the two northern cities and a great importance of the local factors in Naples, where only a dominant role of the candidates can make sense of the detected shifts in voting behaviour.