Panel 1: David W. Brady and Arjun  S. Wilkins Secular realignment in the United States 1937-2010: a preliminary analysis Samuel J. Abrams and Morris P. Fiorina Are leaning independents deluded or dishonest weak partisans? Douglas Rivers Party identification in the US over the electoral cycle Panel 2: Roberto D’Alimonte, Lorenzo De Sio and Nicola Maggini Party identification and party system change: Italy between the First and the Second Republic Hermann Schmitt and Paolo Segatti Political parties, left-right orientations and the vote in Italy, France and Germany Panel 3: Piergiorgio Corbetta and Pasquale Colloca Political orientation in times of crisis in Italy: the consequences of job precariousness Radoslaw Markowski Idiosyncrasies of party identification in...

  On May 25 European Parliament (EP) election was held in Slovakia, the fourth of its kind since the accession of the country to the EU. Two points are worth mentioning in the beginning. First, the turnout increased considerably since the previous election in 2014. However, with roughly one in four voters who attended the election, it was still the lowest number in the whole EU. Second, the results confirmed substantial changes in political life in the recent development of Slovakia with essential implications for the upcoming years. In line with other EU countries, the elections are held under proportional representation...

Nicola Maggini, Lorenzo De Sio and Mathilde van Ditmars Following on the tools provided by issue yield theory (De Sio and Weber 2014), this analysis provides a specific perspective on the data we at CISE collected through a CAWI survey few weeks before the Dutch election. We rely here on an innovative measurement of positional issues, which allows to derive a common issue yield index for this kind of issues. Positional issues are, in general, defined by reference to two rival goals (e.g. progressive vs. traditional morality): the issue yield measure permits us to assess the presence of strategic issue opportunities for a...

Latvia was one of the few EU countries that went to the polls on Saturday, May 25 although advance voting was also available for three days. According to the Central Elections Commission (CEC), there were 1’411’955 persons eligible to vote – a decrease by 4 percent from 2014. A party list system is used to choose eight MEPs, and a voter can express either a positive or a negative preference for each candidate on a list that s/he is to vote for. An electoral threshold of 5 percent is provided in the law but the effective threshold (due to...

The 2019 European Parliament election in Ireland was notable in many ways. First, we saw the main party in government improving on its performance in 2014 (when it was also in government) and on its 2016 general election vote. Fine Gael won 30 per cent of the vote (up 7 points), and will send 5 EPP MEPs to Brussels in the Irish complement of 11(13). (Ireland has 11 seats, but this will rise to 13 if the UK leaves the EU.) A second feature was a notable increase in support for the Green Party, now apparently forgiven for its participation...