Emanuele, V., Maggini, N and Marino, B. (2016). ‘Gaining Votes in Europe against Europe? How National Contexts Shaped the Results of Eurosceptic Parties in the 2014 European Parliament Elections’, Journal of Contemporary European Research. 12 (3), 697-715. Abstract In the wake of the harshest economic crisis since 1929, in several European countries there has been a rise of Eurosceptic parties that oppose EU integration. The 2014 European Parliament elections were a fundamental turning point for these parties. In this article, after a theoretical discussion on the concept of Euroscepticism, we provide an updated classification of Eurosceptic parties after the 2014 European Parliament elections. We...

Emanuele, V. and Marino, B. (2016), 'Follow the candidates, not the parties? Personal vote in a regional de-institutionalised party system', Regional and Federal Studies Abstract This article analyses how personal vote shapes electoral competition and predicts electoral results in a regional de-institutionalized party system. After having analysed the connection between unpredictable political environment and personal vote, we build an original empirical model that explores preferential vote and patterns of re-candidacies and endorsements of the most voted candidates in the Calabrian regional elections. The analysis shows that leading candidates retain a more stable and predictable support over time with respect to parties...

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.