Emanuele, V. (2015). Vote (de-) nationalisation and party system change in Italy (1948–2013). Contemporary Italian Politics, (ahead-of-print), 1-22. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23248823.2015.1076617#.VeYOsfbtmko Abstract The nationalisation of politics is a major political phenomenon deriving from the historical trend towards the formation of national electorates and party systems brought about by the progressive reduction in the significance of territorial cleavages. During the last 50 years, though the issue of vote nationalisation has been addressed by a large volume of literature, serious analysis of the Italian case has never made much progress, having been limited to the reflections of a few isolated authors. Over the past 20 years, a period...

This article has the purpose to assess if and how party system nationalization affects individual voting behaviour. Previous studies on party system nationalization have focused on systemic processes, exclusively dealing with aggregate data. The authors address this topic from a new empirical perspective, arguing that party system nationalization could act as a context dimension interacting with the vote choice function. How does this specific context dimension moderate the explanatory power of individual level characteristics? On which determinants of vote choice does party system nationalization have a greater impact? To answer these questions, the authors focus on 23 European countries through the use of the 2009 European Election Study. The empirical analysis shows that in nationalized contexts the impact of the left-right dimension on party support is higher than in territorialized contexts, while that of class as well as of culture-related variables is lower. The authors also discuss the implications of these findings.

Despite primary elections in Italy continue to be asymmetric – i.e. carried out only by the center-left coalition – their ability to involve the electorate and their growing media impact make it a powerful democratic tool. In this article we study the 2012 Italian primary elections, held by the center-left coalition in order to select the prime ministerial candidate for the 2013 general elections. In particular, we will shed light on three dimensions: turnout, electoral results and competitiveness. We will also take into account the role played by the new candidate selection rule – the two-round system – which will allow us to collect a lot of information about the voting behavior of the selectorate. What has been the turnout level in the 2012 Italian primary elections? Which similarities and differences can be found in the patterns of participation between the first and the second round? Which factors may explain the territorial differences in turnout levels? What have been the territorial patterns of voting behavior for the main candidates? The 2012 primary elections have been more or less competitive with respect to the previous Italian national primaries? We will try to address these questions through the use of a mainly quantitative methodology with aggregate data.

The 2012 municipal election in Palermo produced an unexpected outcome. In the Sicilian city - for a long time a conservative stronghold - the center-right candidate, Massimo Costa did not succeed to reach the second ballot and the election was won by the former Major Leoluca Orlando, supported by a radical left coalition. Orlando prevailed with a sensational 72% of the vote share against the winner of the center-left primary elections, Fabrizio Ferrandelli. What happened in the 2012 Palermo municipal election? Does the Sicilian capital moved suddenly toward the left? Which factors fostered this sharp and unpredictable electoral change that altered the long-time-established political landscape of the City? To answer these questions, the article analyzes the results of the 2012 municipal election in Palermo through an electoral geography approach and the use of a quantitative methodology with ecological data. In particular, the article makes use of both the territorial study of turnout and election results and the voting ecological estimates generated with the traditional Goodman model. The empirical analysis shows that this election was strongly influenced by factors linked to the local context more than by authentically political ones. In other words, Palermo did not move toward the left. Moreover, the internal electoral segmentation of the City between central and peripheral neighborhoods persisted as the main determinant of the vote choice.

In 2011 Italian local elections we observed high electoral mobility: in Milan, for example, the center-left gained his first-time victory in the Berlusconi era, while in Naples there was a significant split voting in the first round and a huge turnaround between the first and the second ballot. A general research question emerged: are the shifts in the results understandable trough a left-right axis (political nature hypothesis of these elections) or were there cross-cutting mechanisms (local nature hypothesis of the elections with a strong role of personal aspects)? To answer the question we analyze the voting ecological estimates in the three biggest cities involved in 2011 elections: Milan, Naples and Turin. For every matrix we generated the estimates both applying the traditional Goodman model (for the whole city and splitting by district) and the hierarchical multinomial-dirichlet model developed by Rosen, Jiang, King and Taner. The most important result of our study is the strong political polarization of the vote in the two northern cities and a great importance of the local factors in Naples, where only a dominant role of the candidates can make sense of the detected shifts in voting behaviour.