Building on the tools provided by issue yield theory (De Sio and Weber 2014), this analysis looks at the data collected by CISE through a CAWI survey launched a few weeks before the first round of the French presidential election. We rely here on an innovative measurement of positional issues, which provides a common issue yield index for this type of issues. Positional issues are, in general, defined by reference to two rival goals (e.g. progressive vs. traditional morality): the issue yield measure assesses the presence of related strategic issue opportunities for a party or a candidate. The core dimensions originally...

Why has Spain elections in 2019? This is the third time since 2015 that Spaniards have voted in a general election. In the first one, the levels of electoral volatility where unprecedented (more than 35 per cent of the voters switched parties between 2011 and 2015) and the number of electoral parties increased in a notable way, from 3.3 to 5.0 (Rama Caamaño 2016). The instability of the party system was profound. In 2015, the high degree of parliamentary fragmentation made it impossible to secure support from a majority of Deputies and constitute a Government (Simon 2016), so Spaniards had to...

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...

Per citare l'articolo: Brader, T., De Sio, L., Paparo, A. and Tucker, J.A. (2020), “Where You Lead, I Will Follow”: Partisan Cueing on High‐Salience Issues in a Turbulent Multiparty System. Political Psychology. doi:10.1111/pops.12651 Scarica l'articolo qui. Abstract: The ability of parties to not only reflect, but actually shape, citizens' preferences on policy issues has been long debated, as it corresponds to a fundamental prediction of classic party identification theory. While most research draws on data from the United States or...

The eventful and unconventional campaign for the French presidential elections (partly) came to an end on Sunday night. Centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron (24,0%) and radical right Marine Le Pen (21,3%) of the Front National have both qualified for the run-off of the presidential election. Even though polls had predicted this results in the months coming to the election, it still constitutes a surprise. The outcome is historically close, and 4 candidates have gathered around 20% of the electorate, and both mainstream parties have been eliminated. After Macron and Le Pen, right-wing candidate François Fillon (20,0%) and radical left Jean-Luc...