1,721,065 research outputs found
Contesto territoriale e voto nelle elezioni del 2006 : un approccio multilivello
No full textItalian electoral outcomes has often been interpreted in geographical terms. However, contextual effects on individual behaviour have seldom been taken into account. This article aims to test whether a link between individual electoral behaviour and context exists and which characteristics of the context have the greater impact on voters' choices. The individual data is drawn from the Italian National Electoral Study 2006 (Itanes 2006, N=2,369); the contextual variables refer to the municipalities where individual observations are clustered. By means of multilevel modelling, the analysis shows that the impact of the municipalities' socio-economic characteristics on individuals' voting is not significant, while the political context, measured in terms of left- or right-wing political tradition, has a much larger effect. A relevant conclusion is that the existence in 2006 of areas with a clear prevalence of centre-right or centre-left votes cannot be explained as a consequence of pre-political socio-economic contextual characteristics. The most convincing explanation focuses on the persistence of strong political traditions at the municipal level, that survived the almost complete redefinition of the political "supply" at the beginning of the 1990s
Thou shalt not cheat : how to reduce internet use in web surveys on political knowledge
Full text linkBy means of a split-ballot survey experiment, we study whether a normative instruction not to use the internet when answering political knowledge questions reduces cheating in web surveys. The knowledge questions refer to basic facts about the European Union and the data come from the Italian National Election Study web panel carried out in Italy before the 2014 European Election. Our analysis shows that a simple normative instruction significantly reduces cheating. We also show that reducing cheating is important to achieve a correct assessment of reliability of knowledge scales, while a decrease of cheating leaves unaltered the knowledge gap between lower and higher educated respondents. These results invite caution when including political knowledge questions in an online survey. Our advice is to include a normative instruction not to search the internet to reduce cheating and obtain more genuine answers. More generally, we conclude by stressing the need to consider the implications of online data collection when building questionnaires for public opinion research
The Italian space of electoral competition in pandemic times
No full textThe polls on the voting intentions of Italians during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed substantial stability of electoral orientations in the first phase of the pandemic, while they detected a certain fluidity after the birth of the Draghi government, specifically with a decline of the League and M5s and the growth of Brothers of Italy (FdI). The results of the 2022 general election confirmed those trends with a clear-cut victory of the (centre-)right coalition, this time led by Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. In the meantime, the opponents experienced a poor electoral performance, and an even more deceiving result in terms of seats. All these upheavals have led many pundits to speculate about what would have been the results if the opponents to the right-wing coalition would have succeeded in building a coalition to achieve a higher level of competitiveness in the first-past-the-post electoral districts. But, beyond considerations based on vote intentions or electoral results, to what extent are these speculations consistent with the actual space of electoral competition among main Italian parties? In other words, on which areas of the electoral space does the competition unfold and how did those areas evolve? This paper answers these questions using original survey data from the ResPOnsE COVID-19 project. In particular, through the scale analysis of a set of propensity-to-vote (PTV) measures, we investigate the configuration of the electoral competition space in the aftermath of 2022 general election and how (and if) this configuration changes over three distinct phases of the pandemic: during the first wave (spring-summer 2020), during the third wave (spring 2021) and during the fourth wave (autumn-winter 2021). Results show that regardless of the period analysed, party competition occurs mainly within the right, whose party electorates strongly overlap, whereas more barriers exist among party electorates of the opposite camp
The Italian space of electoral competition in pandemic times
No full textThe polls on the voting intentions of Italians during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed substantial stability of electoral orientations in the first phase of the pandemic, while they detected a certain fluidity after the birth of the Draghi government, specifically with a decline of the League and M5s and the growth of Brothers of Italy (FdI). The results of the 2022 general election confirmed those trends with a clear-cut victory of the (centre-)right coalition, this time led by Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. In the meantime, the opponents experienced a poor electoral performance, and an even more deceiving result in terms of seats. All these upheavals have led many pundits to speculate about what would have been the results if the opponents to the right-wing coalition would have succeeded in building a coalition to achieve a higher level of competitiveness in the first-past-the-post electoral districts. But, beyond considerations based on vote intentions or electoral results, to what extent are these speculations consistent with the actual space of electoral competition among main Italian parties? In other words, on which areas of the electoral space does the competition unfold and how did those areas evolve? This paper answers these questions using original survey data from the ResPOnsE COVID-19 project. In particular, through the scale analysis of a set of propensity-to-vote (PTV) measures, we investigate the configuration of the electoral competition space in the aftermath of 2022 general election and how (and if) this configuration changes over three distinct phases of the pandemic: during the first wave (spring-summer 2020), during the third wave (spring 2021) and during the fourth wave (autumn-winter 2021). Results show that regardless of the period analysed, party competition occurs mainly within the right, whose party electorates strongly overlap, whereas more barriers exist among party electorates of the opposite camp
Religion and Politics in Italian Electoral Choice : Which comes First in the New Century Electoral Divisions?
No full textThis paper analyses the changing links between religion, politics and voting
behaviour in the last thirty years from an Italian perspective. After a brief
description of the changes that occurred in the relations between religiosity
and the vote in Italy in the last decades, we contrast the explanations of these
changes by two theories of political change. The starting point of both theories
is that the relation between social identities, namely religious identities,
and party choice has weakened. However, the first theory, called here Partisan
Dealignment theory (Dalton, Flanagan, Beck, 1984; Norris, Inglehart,
2004), proposes an exclusively sociological explanation of these changes,
while the second theory, called here Politics Matters theory (Thomassen,
2005), underlines the fact that the political and institutional context can interact
with social change in defining and constraining the political behaviour of
citizens. The test of the different hypotheses derived from the two theories is
based on the empirical evidence from four Italian electoral surveys (1972,
1985, 2001 and 2006). The finding suggests that, similarly to what happened
in the Netherlands, in Italy the relation between religiosity, ideology and party
choice was mainly influenced by changes in the political-institutional
sphere (namely, the almost complete change of the political alternatives –
parties and coalitions – available and the reform of the electoral law at the
beginning of the 90s). The strong process of secularization of Italian society
only warrants that, after its disappearance, the religious cleavage will not
come back to life in the same form it had before, even if political entrepreneurs
or parties will try to mobilize voters using religious appeals
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