The major winners of the 2017 Austrian election held on October 15 were the parties of the right of the ideological spectrum. The Christian democratic People’s Party (ÖVP) obtained 31.5% of votes, coming in first place and increasing its vote share by more than 7 percentage points and obtaining 15 parliamentary seats more compared to the last general election held in 2013. Despite being unable to secure the second position and to equal the all-time high election results of 1999, the populist far right Freedom party (FPÖ) increased its vote share since 2013 by 5.5 points to 26 per...

The recent presidential elections in Poland have seen the unexpected victory of Andrzej Duda, candidate of the conservative right. However, Mikołaj Cześnik from SWPS Warsaw (University of Social Sciences and Humanities) reveals how Duda and its PiS (Law and Justice) party, expected to win the parliamentary elections in the next fall, will likely keep Poland's pro-EU stances mostly unchanged, and perhaps even promote economic measures aimed at more equality. Watch the full interview.  

On the next 8th June, UK voters will be faced with a decisive election, which could have a profound impact not only on British internal affairs but also on the Brexit negotiations with the European Union. Beyond the analysis of the UK public opinion and political parties, derived from the original survey conducted by the CISE, a matter that requires further investigation and has been gaining increasing attention by pundits and the media is surely the forecasting of the composition of the next House of Commons.  In the past few days, more and more experts have been underlying that the...

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...

Vincenzo Emanuele, Lorenzo De Sio and Mathilde van Ditmars Falling in a Western European context of increasing electoral unpredictability and party system change (Chiaramonte and Emanuele 2015), the upcoming elections in The Netherlands are receiving a lot of media attention in the international press, as it is the first of a range of upcoming European elections (before France and Germany) that are expected to mark the future of European politics. Consistently with an international context where right-wing populism is on the rise, with the election of Donald Trump and the candidature of Marine le Pen, in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ party...