La République en Marche (LREM), Emmanuel Macron’s newly formed political party has taken a decisive lead in the first round of the legislative elections with 32% of the votes on Sunday June 11. Les Républicains (LR, right) come second with 21%, followed by the Front National at 13% (FN, radical right), La France Insoumise at 11% (LFI, radical left), and Parti Socialiste (PS) with a bit less than 10% of the votes (including its traditional allies). In a two-round single member district electoral system, the lead of LREM (despite being around 11%) could lead to a hegemonic domination in...

Aldo Paparo & Lorenzo De Sio (2017) PTV gap as a new measure of partisanship: a panel-data, multi-measure validation showing surprising partisanship stability, Contemporary Italian Politics, 9:1, 60-83, DOI: 10.1080/23248823.2017.1289733 Aldo Paparo, interviewed by Andrea Maccagno (English translation by Elisabetta Mannoni) The basic concept your paper starts from is party identification. What does it mean? CISE Interviews are aimed at spreading CISE research activities, which yield scientific publications in national and international journals. Their format, as an interview to a young CISE intern, allows to present publication contents in a simple form, overcoming difficulties of technical language and often complex statistical tools. The idea of...

  The European Parliament elections of 2019 in Greece took place on 26 May together with municipal and regional elections. The governmental party of the radical left SYRIZA suffered severe losses and the centre-right party of New Democracy (ND) increased its electoral strength and dominates again in the Greek party system after the period 2012-2015. The outcome of the election had immediate consequences for the national electoral arena. On the night of the election, the Greek PM Alexis Tsipras called for snap elections (four months ahead) to be held on 7 July 2019. The context The 2019 European election in Greece was...

The election of the European Parliament took place in metropolitan France on May 26 (oversees departments had already voted the day before). 74 seats were to be filled, with an additional 5 seats on reserve in case of a Brexit. The election is based on a proportional system, with a 5 per cent minimum threshold: Only lists which pass this threshold obtain representatives in the European Parliament. The party lists are closed, meaning that citizens vote for one list, but cannot express any preference for specific candidates within that list. While this electoral rule was similar to the one...

The long-awaited first round of French presidential election is now history. Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen will be on the second-round ballot, as recent surveys had predicted. In a two-week time, French electors will be again called to the polls to choose between the two the resident in the Élysée Palace for the next five years. How is this going to end? The French case is the paradigm of two-round systems, where the crucial determinant lies in the second preferences of those who at the first round voted for someone not admitted to the second round. In this specific case, the decisive...