The year of challengers? Issues, public opinion, and elections in Western Europe in 2017 edited by Lorenzo De Sio and Aldo Paparo Within the seven-month period going from mid-March to mid-October of 2017, five Western-European democracies held their general elections: the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Austria. This provided an exceptional opportunity to study public opinion structures in these countries in the particularly turbulent context that followed disruptive electoral developments such as the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. To exploit this opportunity, the CISE launched an innovative comparative research project to empirically assess before the elections the preferences of...

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...

26 May 2019 saw an election paradox in Hungary: a long-serving government won big on a record-high turnout, yet the winners looked frustrated and the losers positively re-charged. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz-KDNP electoral alliance took well over 52% of the popular vote and 62% of the country’s 21 seats in the European Parliament. That is one seat and one percent of the vote up compared to the 2014 EP elections, and just one seat and four percent of the vote less than their all-time best in 2009. But Fidesz’ leaders appeared disappointed and the government shortly announced unexpected...

Dr. Alistair Clark, Newcastle University E: Alistair.clark@ncl.ac.uk T: @ClarkAlistairJ In my earlier blog for CISE on the UK’s 2015 general election, I noted how uncertain the polls were, with none of the two main British parties – Conservative or Labour - able to make a decisive break prior to polling day. I ended by suggesting that there was likely to be an investigation into the polling industry after election day. One of those predictions came true. Unfortunately for the reputation of political science predictions, it was that there will be an inquiry into the performance of the polling industry. Expectations were of a hung...

To cite the article: Emanuele, V. (2021). Lost in Translation? Class Cleavage Roots and Left Electoral Mobilization in Western Europe. Perspectives on Politics, 1-19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592721000943 The article is open access and can be accessed here Abstract I investigate whether the strength of the class cleavage in Western Europe still “translates” into the electoral mobilization of the left. This research question is addressed through comparative longitudinal analysis in nineteen Western European countries after World War II. In particular, the impact of class cleavage is investigated...