According to the spontaneous reactions from the parties’ wakes during the Swedish election night May 26, all parties were winners. The parties that lost support did not lose as much as they had feared, and among the parties that gained, celebration was loud and joyful. The only exception was the small Feminist Initiative that lost the single seat they won in 2014. Background The European Parliament election 2019 took place less than a year after the national election in September 2018, which led to the most prolonged government negotiations in Swedish history. Not until January 2019 did the Social Democrats and...

Introduction The 2019 European election in the Republic of Cyprus came three years after the last legislative elections of 2016 and one year after the presidential elections of 2018 which saw the right-wing governing party, DISY and President Nicos Anastasiades, renew their mandate for another five years. In the backlog of the campaign politics and electoral results that lie before us, one can observe a number of realignments in the patterns of political competition. Although each of them carries significance, their overall relevance in the island’s political evolution is certainly not analogous to a major transformation of domestic politics. Rather,...

  Introduction Contrary to the general European trend, the Maltese Labour Party won the European election held on the 25 May by a comfortable majority and took four of the six European parliament seats allotted to Malta. In 2014 it had also won a majority of votes, but only three seats (Carammia and Pace, 2015). The opposition Nationalist Party failed to arrest its electoral decline whose roots go back to 2004, but won the other two seats. As in the previous three European elections the Europhile parties won more than 96% of the valid votes cast. This is consistent with...

Nicola Maggini, Lorenzo De Sio e Mathilde van Ditmars (Traduzione in italiano di Elisabetta Mannoni) Seguendo gli strumenti forniti dalla teoria della issue yield (De Sio e Weber 2014), questa analisi si basa su un'innovativa modalità di misura dei cosiddetti temi posizionali (positional issues), che consente di creare un indice di issue yield comune per questo tipo di tematiche. I temi posizionali sono generalmente definiti dalla presenza di due obiettivi opposti (ad esempio, moralità progressista vs. tradizionale): la misura di issue yield ci consente di stimare la presenza di issue opportunities potenzialmente strategiche per un partito. Le dimensioni fondamentali elaborate originariamente...