Lorenzo De Sio Party systems across the Western world appear increasingly challenged. After the 1990s and 2000s saw the prevalence of a two-bloc (or two-party) competition by mainstream parties with relatively similar, moderate policies, recent years have seen an unprecedented emergence of successful challenger parties (and leaders), with examples both on the right-wing (e.g. Donald Trump, the UKIP, the Front National) and on the left wing (e.g. Bernie Sanders, SYRIZA, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn and Benoît Hamon). Such new, challenger parties and leaders share instead a conflictual emphasis on a relatively small set of controversial policy issues that have proved electorally...

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 British general election. Similarly to what we have recently done before the Dutch parliamentary election last March and the French Presidential election last April, we rely 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...

Riproduciamo qui tradotto un articolo apparso oggi sul blog EUROPP della London School of Economics(traduzione di Federico Trastulli) Le elezioni presidenziali americane del 3 novembre saranno seguite dall'Europa con grande intersse. Basandosi su recenti dati di sondaggio originali, Davide Angelucci, Lorenzo De Sio, Morris P. Fiorina e Mark N. Franklin illustrano la sfida che attende Donald Trump nel suo tentativo di rielezione. Al momento non ci sono temi divisivi su cui Trump si trova a ottenere più sostegno da indipendenti e democratici di quanto non possa perdere dalla sua stessa base elettorale; mentre...

Next Sunday, French voters will be called to the polls for the first round of the Presidential elections. During the final days of the electoral campaign, we want to provide a meaningful overview and interpretation of the structure of issue competition in the French system. To this purpose, CISE has collected an original dataset through CAWI interviews on a representative sample of the French voting-age population. In particular, in this article we focus on the candidates’ credibility on different issues. Our data includes a set of nine valence issues, on which there is by definition a consensual agreement (Stokes 1963)....

Recent electoral events (the Brexit referendum; Trump's victory) have testified a phenomenon that is increasingly relevant in recent elections: the presence of an information gap in the first hours after the end of the scrutiny. As first results start to flow in from specific local areas, uncertainty emerges. This is especially true when results come from areas with a particularly specific political tradition, so that the partial scrutiny is not representative of what might be the final result. This often produces a deep uncertainty, with relevant effects not only on public opinion and politicians' reactions, but also (an perhaps...