Turnout,preferential voting and vote flows in the E.U. election1

ABSTRACT

This article aims at focusing on four main features of the European elections that were held on 26 May 2019. Firstly, it analyses electoral turnout, both from a diachronic and a geographical point of view. Secondly, it presents electoral data and identifies winners and losers of the vote, not only by comparing 2019 E.U. results to 2014 E.U. results and 2018 political results, but especially focusing on the territorial dimension of electoral dynamics. Thirdly, it discusses flows of vote in five Italian cities (Brescia, Turin, Florence, Naples, Palermo), in order to give a clearer picture of how citizens (potentially) changed their electoral preferences from 2018 to 2019. Fourthly, it focuses on preferential vote, with the aim of distinguishing between parties characterized by ‘micro-personalization’ and ‘macro-personalization’. On many of these aspects, the 2019 European elections in Italy can be understood on the basis of the well-known ‘second-order election theory’. Yet, there are also interesting empirical findings that deviate from this pattern, among which the electoral success of the League – one of the two parties in government at the moment of the elections – merits further attention and can be mostly explained on the basis of government political action. That same electoral success, in addition, represented one of the causes that led to the end of the so-called yellow-green government in August 2019.     

Italian candidates under the Rosato mixed electoral system. In search of personal votes in the plurality tier?

The Rosato law has established a new electoral system featuring single-member districts (S.M.Ds) along with a prevailing proportional tier. S.M.Ds are typically associated with individual incentives to cultivate a personal vote and with a more direct link between representatives and their local constituency. This article investigates patterns of personalized votes in the Italian elections of March 2018 by analysing voting data about candidates for the Chamber of Deputies who ran in the plurality tier. Results reveal that only a minor – although not negligible – portion of Italian voters cast their ballot for an individual candidate only, and that these votes had almost no impact on the outcomes of competition in S.M.Ds. Moreover, some interesting differences across geographical areas, parties and coalitions emerge in the use of personalized vote.     

The Dynamics of the Electoral Geography of the Five Star Movement: The Role of Territorial Area and Municipality Size

ABSTRACT

The aim of the article is to trace the evolution of the Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement [M.5.S.]) over the last four national elections (the 2013 and 2018 general elections and the 2014 and 2019 European elections). In particular, our goal is to understand how the electoral support for the party changed, in the context of the broad transformations of the Italian electoral geography. In order to accomplish this goal, we investigate the explanatory role of the spatial dimension on electoral support, specifically in terms of geographical zone and municipality size. The M.5.S. is also compared with the two parties that reported the best results in the last European elections: the Lega (League) and the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party [P.D.]). Our results show that the recent European elections do not represent a turning point in the (electoral and geographical) history of the M.5.S.: its territorial rooting in the south of the country and in medium-sized municipalities are present from the 2014 European elections onwards. Interpretations and implications of these findings are discussed in the conclusions.     

From confusion to confusion: The 1981 general election in New Zealand

The 1981 New Zealand general election was fought against a background of electoral upheaval and uncertainty that had characterized New Zealand politics during the 1970s. The preceding three years had also witnessed the rise in popularity of the country's leading minor party, the Social Credit Political League. It was difficult to predict how the League would fare in terms of capturing seats in the election. The election was held in the wake of the socially divisive rugby tour by the South African Springboks and in the midst of debate over the National government's new growth strategy. It was not entirely surprising, then, when the election produced a very close and curious result. The National Party won the election narrowly, but both major parties made substantial gains in some areas and substantial losses in others. Social Credit made major gains of votes from both National and Labour but failed to win further seats. The electorate was seemingly still in deep confusion.     

A revisionist interpretation of the impact of Queensland's electoral scheme

In December 1989 Queensland voters changed their government from National Party to Labor Party. Labor had been out of office since August 1957, a record period of opposition for a major party. How is that very lengthy Labor period in the wilderness to be explained? The orthodox interpretation is that there has been a gerrymander in Queensland. This article argues, however, that Queensland's electoral system is the same as that of other mainland states. While it is true that electorates are malapportioned in Queensland (and in Western Australia), nevertheless the method of single member electorates with preferential voting is in use for all mainland states. Such a system does not translate a party's percentage of votes into a similar percentage of seats in the Legislative Assembly. The elections of 1956 and 1989 each saw Labor getting a first preference vote in excess of 50 per cent— with which Labor won in excess of 60 per cent of the seats. At no election between these dates did Labor secure a majority of votes, either first preference or two party preferred.     

Under what conditions do ethnic minority candidates attract the ethnic minority vote? How neighbourhood and candidate characteristics affected ethnic affinity voting in the Dutch 2017 parliamentary elections

Ethnic affinity voting is the term for when political party candidates with an ethnic minority background receive a larger share of the vote in ethnically dense neighbourhoods. This study is one of the first to provide a detailed test for ethnic affinity voting during a national election in an open-list proportional representation system, with the same ballots in every polling station. It tests the conditions under which ethnic affinity voting is greater, studying the proportion of votes for ethnic minority candidates at neighbourhood level in the Netherlands in 2017, when a minority-interest party entered parliament and the traditional ethnic vote for the social democratic party (PvdA) imploded. This study disentangles party and candidate effects and finds evidence for (general and specific) ethnic affinity voting at candidate level. Even though ethnic minority candidates attract fewer votes, they perform better in neighbourhoods where more minorities live, especially when the group size of co-ethnics is larger. Ethnic affinity effects are relatively strong for candidates affiliated with minority-oriented and left-wing parties, and absent or negative for ethnic candidates of right-wing parties. Moreover, whether male or female ethnic candidates are more likely to attract the ethnic vote also depends on the ethnic background and party affiliation of the candidate.     

Electoral Disproportionality and Bias Under the Alternative Vote: Elections to Australia's House of Representatives

Studies of electoral disproportionality and bias under Australia's alternative electoral system have mainly relied on the two-party preferred (2PP) vote totals for all electorates, irrespective of whether these are needed to determine the election outcome there. We argue that separate analyses should be undertaken for two groups of electorates – where the determination is made using the first-preference (FP) votes and where the 2PP redistributed votes are needed because no candidate wins a majority of FP votes, illustrating this with an analysis of the 2007 House of Representatives election results.     

The Italian party system’s three functional arenas after the 2018 election: the tsunami after the earthquake

The aim of this article is to assess to what extent the ‘change’ after the 2018 Italian election can be observed in the electoral, parliamentary and governmental arenas. We use the indicators of party ‘volatility’ and ‘innovation’ to measure the change in each arena. The time span is the period 1948–2018, with a specific focus on the time after the watershed election of 1994. In this respect, we have identified a crucial difference between the 1994 change and that of 2013–18: if 1994 was the single moment of passage from one party system to another, in the 2010s the change did not happen in a single moment. Only after the next election, if volatility and innovation in the three arenas is reduced substantially, could we claim that a new party system has developed, that could be considered the ‘third party system’ of the Italian Republic.     

Post-electoral politics in Italy: institutional problems and political perspectives

A dysfunctional electoral law and an obsolete bicameral Parliament contributed to the surprising results of the 24–25 February 2013 Italian elections, which have solved none of Italy's institutional and political problems. This article briefly analyses the distribution of votes, stressing especially that the success of the Five Stars Movement derives from the dissatisfaction and the protest of a significant sector of the electorate. Beppe Grillo, like Silvio Berlusconi, is a political entrepreneur, who through patience, hard work and commitment has constructed an organization with a wide geographical following. The presence in Parliament of the Five Stars Movement made the election of the President of the Republic very difficult. President Napolitano was obliged to accept an unprecedented second term and then led the Democratic Party, the People of Freedom and Civic Choice to form an unusual government, almost a sort of Grand Coalition. The government is here briefly assessed. The article ends underlining two critical aspects of the situation. Neither the Italian parties nor the party system have succeeded in reaching a satisfactory level of consolidation and stability. This means that the President of the Republic has been obliged to make good the shortcomings of the political parties. Even malgré soi, the President's behaviour has given rise to a situation in which his own position raises the urgent need for institutional reforms along the lines of the semi-presidential mould of the French Fifth Republic to bring to a close Italy's overlong political transition.     

Teaching Canadian Literature

Abstract

Canada and the United States are two democracies on the North American continent sharing a common border, common British heritage, and for the most part a common language. At the same time, the two political systems abound with structural differences. Canadians, unlike voters in the U.S., cannot split their votes among various parties and candidates, and the single house Parliamentary system with tight party discipline renders an individual back-bench MP relatively powerless. The questions addressed by this article concern similarities and differences of Canadian and U.S. urban voters as they make electoral selections in these similar cultures and dissimilar, yet democratic, political systems. First, do social factors such as class, ethnicity, and religion provide similar bases for cleavage in Canada and the U.S.? Canadian society supposedly has a more easily defined class structure than the U.S. Does this difference carry over into the area of electoral choice? Do ethnicity and religion, as reported, differentiate party support in both countries? Second, individual factors such as the voter's party identification and impression of the party leaders (or presidential candidates) have been shown in the U.S. to be of dominant importance in predicting an individual's vote. What is the relative importance of these factors in determining voting choice in the two countries? The three-party Canadian context renders difficult any clear-cut comparisons to the two-party U.S., but useful avenues of speculation emerge. The NDP has a working-class base, but cannot attract the poor. Class does not significantly distinguish PC's and Liberals, the dominant parties, and on ethnicity and religion PC and NDP supporters bear a strong resemblance to each other. In the U.S. the expected associations obtain between Democratic vote and working class, Catholic religion, and foreign-born parentage. Party identification and attractiveness of the party leader, long recognized as important influences on voters in the U.S., seem from these data to play a similar role in Canada. Consequently, the individual electoral decision is dominated by more similarities than might be suggested from observing the differences in electoral and decision-making structures. Perhaps culture rather than political structure is dominant (within certain limits) in a voter's electoral decisions.     

Labour electoral landslides and the changing efficiency of voting distributions

The translation of votes into seats under first–past–the–post electoral systems with single–member constituencies invariably results in disproportional allocations of seats relative to votes among the main two parties. It also tends to produce biased outcomes, with one party getting a more disproportionate share of the seats with a given share of the votes than does its opponent. In Great Britain, these biases favoured the Conservative party until the 1980s, but now strongly favour Labour. Production of those biases results from a variety of influences involving the interaction of the geography of party support with that of constituency boundaries. Increasingly, that interaction has favoured Labour: without any explicit manipulation of the constituency map to its own ends, it now benefits substantially from the equivalent of the malapportionment and gerrymandering cartographic abuses typical of the United States, because of its ability to manipulate its vote distribution within the constituency system.     

‘We Lost on the Numbers,But for Us It's a Victory’: New Caledonia's 2018 Referendum on Self-Determination

On 4 November 2018, more than 141,000 voters in New Caledonia went to the polls to determine the political status of the French Pacific dependency. A referendum on self-determination, the culmination of a 20-year transition under the 1998 Noumea Accord, posed the question: ‘Do you want New Caledonia to accede to full sovereignty and become independent?’

In an unprecedented turnout, 56.67 per cent of voters decided to remain within the French Republic, while 43.33 per cent voted Yes for independence. These figures, with a clear majority opposing full sovereignty, suggest a setback for New Caledonia's independence coalition Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS). In reality, the size of the Yes vote has disappointed partisans of the French Republic and opened the way for a second referendum in 2020.

After briefly outlining the 1998 Noumea Accord, the article details the results and participation rates in the November 2018 vote. It then focuses on different aspects of the referendum campaign, including: the role of opinion polling, administration of the referendum by the French state; disputes over electoral registration; international monitoring; key objectives of the anti-independence parties; grassroots campaigning by the FLNKS and the significance of the youth vote. It flags some issues in the aftermath of the referendum, as New Caledonians prepare for the next local elections to be held on 12 May 2019.     

The South Australian Election of 18 March 2006

The South Australian election on 18 March 2006 saw the Labor Party; led by Mike Rann, storm out from the shadows of minority government to record a decisive victory which has the potential to set a platform from which the party could govern for at least the next eight years. Labor won 28 of the 47 seats in the House of Assembly gaining 45.2% of first preference votes. However, the decisiveness of its victory in the Lower House was not matched by the result in the Legislative Council. Voters turned away from both major parties giving 4 of the 11 seats contested to minor parties and independents. This continued a trend that has been evident in South Australian elections for the last two decades, although on this occasion its dramatic acceleration was explained by the extraordinary result of the ‘No Pokies’ independent Nick Xenophon who won 23.5% of the vote and easily secured two quotas. The election campaign itself marked new heights in the trend towards presidential style campaigning on the part of the Labor Party which used extensive television advertising to make the most of its popular leader. The Liberals, on the other hand, lacked both a leader to counter Rann and the funds to match Labor's advertising budget. The election also saw the confirmation of Family First as a significant player in South Australian politics, and may mark the beginning of the end of the Australian Democrats. The Democrats failed to make any impact and were effectively replaced by the Greens, who in winning a seat in the Legislative Council enjoyed their first South Australian electoral success.     

Italy says no: the 2016 constitutional referendum and its consequences

On 4 December 2016, Italians went to the polls to say yes or no in a popular referendum called by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on his package of constitutional reforms. Turnout was very high: 65.5 per cent. The No vote scored an impressive victory: 59.1 per cent rejected those reforms; 40.9 per cent supported them. This article puts those reforms in the context of previous attempts to modify several articles of the Italian constitution. The authors analyze and criticize the substance of those reforms and explain their possible impact on the functioning of the Italian political system. The Yes and No alignments were somewhat diversified, while the Yes vote got a lot of support from an often curious combination of domestic and foreign bedfellows interested in the political stability of Renzi’s government more than in any specific reform. Renzi’s defeat led to his resignation. A new government was immediately formed. It is unclear when and whether other, different constitutional reforms will be formulated. The Italian political and institutional transition continues while once again attention is focused on the electoral law and on how to restructure the parties and the party system.     

The Impact of Proportional Representation on Turnout: Evidence from New Zealand

Theories of voter turnout assume that institutional arrangements can alter incentives for participation. Countries with proportional representation (PR) are assumed to increase the incentives to participate because they reduce the proportion of votes that are wasted, giving voters a stronger incentive to participate and parties a stronger incentive to mobilise voters. This paper departs from previous cross-national studies by employing individual-level data during a transition between electoral systems in one country. We used survey data collected before and after electoral reform in New Zealand to examine patterns of participation among political minorities. As a direct test of individual change, the analysis was supplemented with survey data from the last election held under first past the post (FPP) merged with validated participation data from the following election held under PR. We found that the adoption of PR in New Zealand has succeeded initially in fostering more positive attitudes about the efficacy of voting. In New Zealand's first election held under PR, voters who were on the extreme left were significantly more likely to participate than previously, leading to an overall increase in turnout.     

Fighting over friends and neighbors: The effect of inter-candidate geographic distance on intra-party competition

Previous studies on intra-party competition have largely neglected the role played by geographic distance between co-partisan candidates. In this study, we argue that candidates who live further away from intra-party competitors on the same party list benefit electorally from their remoteness. Moreover, we contend that the electoral effectiveness of exhibiting local personal vote attributes – a theoretically and empirically well-established candidate strategy to cultivate personal votes – also depends on the geographical proximity of localized co-partisan candidates. Using a unique and untapped dataset of more than 5,000 Finnish election candidates' home address coordinates over four consecutive parliamentary elections (1999–2011), we run beta regression models to examine the effects of candidate remoteness and nearest candidates' local characteristics on intra-party vote shares. To measure the remoteness of a particular candidate, we develop a novel index based on the distribution of co-partisans over concentric circles around that candidate. The empirical analyses show that the effect of geographic remoteness depends on local party strength and the degree of urbanization: candidates particularly benefit from more distant co-partisans in party strongholds and rural and suburban municipalities. Moreover, all models confirm that nearby located localized co-partisans decrease a candidate's own vote share. These findings have important implications for politicians' careers, party nomination strategies and future empirical research on intra-party competition.     

On elections,voting and participation:

To summarise, there were five interesting features of the election: (i) the size of the first preference movement from the major parties to the Australian Democrats; (ii) the unexpected lack of any significant swing to Labor in the two‐party preferred vote; (iii) the notable uniformity of the results from state to state; (iv) such swing to Labor as did occur was mainly in seats already held by Labor and in urban areas; and (v) the results demonstrate that the electoral boundaries still contain a bias against Labor.     

Sources of electoral support for the Australian democrats in the house of representatives and Senate elections of 1990 and 1993: A comparative analysis

Election to the Australian Senate under proportional voting and statewide quotas gives to minor parties of the political centre a chance to win parliamentary representation otherwise denied them in the single member constituency‐based House of Representatives. Focusing on the Australian Democrats, vote splitting in the context of ? consistently higher levels of support for the Democrats in the upper house provides some evidence of differences among sources of electoral support between House and Senate, but within a context of general similarity of voter behaviour. Findings support a view that, as a party of ‘concerns’ rather than ideology, with a highly unstable support base, the future of the Democrats as other than a focus for protest must remain in doubt.     

The challenges to democracy and citizenship surrounding the vote to Italians overseas

In 2003, a presidential decree enacted legislation guaranteeing Italian voters overseas the right to postal voting as well as parliamentary representation within their respective electoral constituency. The electoral weight of the overseas-based constituent had a remarkable effect on the 2006 election results. In the tightest vote in the Republic's history, the vote of overseas Italians, which was one of the decisive features of the election, helped provide the winning centre-left coalition with a slender majority in the Senate. Election results notwithstanding, the question of whether to grant the vote to Italians overseas has faced challenges of a procedural, normative and political nature. What may have been initially seen as a democratic right may well be cast aside as it poses challenges to overseas electoral relationships with the Italian national polity, Italian citizenship and multinational allegiances, diasporic identity, electoral participation and political representation in homeland political institutions. The overseas vote for Italians may be contested further in the near future, which could translate into a radical rethink of its validity and democratic global extension.     

Compulsory voting,turnout and party advantage in Australia∗

Who votes or does not vote in a voluntary system has long been thought to have distinct benefits for different political parties. High turnout has been seen as aiding parties of the left, low turnout parties of the right. Although Australia has a compulsory system of voting, this paper shows tha there are still party advantages and disadvantages associated with the 5 percent of the eligible electorate who fail to vote. When turnout is high, Labor makes a net gain in votes, and when turnout is low, the Liberal‐National coalition benefit. Making estimates of nonvoting in Britain and applying them to Australia indicates that this pattern would persist if voluntary voting were applied to Australia, giving the Liberal‐National coalition an inbuilt advantage.