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Defence date: 21 June 2017 ; Examining Board: Professor Alexander H. Trechsel, University of Lucerne (Supervisor); Professor Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute; Professor Russell J. Dalton, University of California, Irvine; Professor David Farrell, University College Dublin ; How is electoral competition structured in Europe? This fundamental problem lies at the core of democracy, as popular sovereignty depends on the existence of a real policy choice, and requires the most preferred alternative being selected and implemented (Dahl 1956). However, there is no consensus yet regarding the actual occurrence of this mechanism of responsive electoral competition (Schumpeter 1942). I develop a new empirical design to test whether a structure of electoral competition in Europe actually exists, based on the idea that greater party system polarization should be associated with a smaller propensity for voters to switch between electoral blocks. To do so, I identify two potential loci of electoral competition in Europe: the left-right dimension (Downs 1957; Bartolini and Mair 1990), and the more recently introduced integration-demarcation cleavage (Kriesi 1998; Kriesi et al. 2006). Data from the European Election Survey (2009, 2014) allow the implementation of the novel design in order to study electoral competition in 27 EU member states. For this thesis to empirically address the question of electoral competition in Europe a preliminary, methodological development has to be made. Indices of political polarization are generally produced using survey respondents' average perceptions of party positions. I show that this approach leads to systematic measurement error: the problem, known as Differential Item Functioning (DIF), depends on the fact that voter perceptions are subjective and cannot be directly compared, neither within nor between countries. To separate the actual polarization from perceptual bias, I develop a two-stage Bayesian Aldrich-McKelvey (2S-BAM) scaling procedure and apply Dalton's index on DIF-corrected measures of party positions (ideal points) on both dimensions. Results show that when standard DIF-inflated polarization indices are used, left-right ideology seems to be still structuring European electoral competition. However, once the indices are optimized, using party ideal points, the integration-demarcation cleavage gains the upper hand over the left-right dimension in structuring electoral competition in contemporary Europe. Thus, this thesis makes both a methodological and theoretical, as well as an empirical contribution to the literature in this field.

Abstract
This paper examines the strategic use of public news media – specifically television (TV) – as an instrument of political influence, focusing on Italy's 2011 financial crisis under Berlusconi's premiership. Using an original large corpus of over 20,000 hours of televised news transcripts and a quasi-experimental design, we investigate how political influence altered media coverage and, subsequently, public opinion and electoral outcomes. Our difference-in-differences analysis, complemented by unsupervised text scaling of news content, reveals a significant shift from "hard" political news to "soft" news on public TV during Berlusconi's tenure. Findings suggest a deliberate reduction in hard news coverage by an average of 107 seconds daily, which significantly increased voter support for Berlusconi's party. In the conclusions, we discuss the broader implications of our findings for media independence in Western democracies amid the emergence of artificial intelligence-generated news contents and the prevalence of algorithmically tailored news feeds.

First Published online: 13 October 2014. First Online in issue 21 September 2016. ; This article provides an empirical assessment of the causal structure underlying the core dependent variable of electoral research (the vote) and two of its most notable predictors (partisanship and leader evaluations). A critical review of traditional models of voting highlights the need to account for the reciprocal relationship between the main predictors as well as for the potential feedback stemming from the dependent variable. In the light of these considerations, a new 'iron triangle' of electoral research would seem to take shape, with partisanship, leader evaluations and the vote tight to each other by a strong link of reciprocal causation. Making use of pre-/post-election surveys from Britain and Italy, the empirical analysis provides evidence for a strong effect of past behavior on political attitudes. However, past behavior seems to exert its effect mainly on partisan attitudes, whereas party leader evaluations appear only slightly affected. The results point to the considerably weakened role of partisanship as attitudinal anchor of vote choice. Leader evaluations, on the contrary, emerge as a crucial component in the voting decision.

Propensity-to-vote (PTV) scores are ever more commonly used in electoral research as a measure of electoral utilities. Yet a growing literature employs them as dependent variable in the voting equation in place of the lower information granted by vote recall questions. However, this choice can be seen as problematic because of the very structure of election survey research. To the extent that voters' PTVs are measured in post-election surveys (as it is often the case) these are likely to result endogenously produced by actual voting behavior in the past election – thus partly undermining the validity of the PTV question which, ideally, should not be related to any specific election. In this paper, we try to disentangle the relationship between short-term political attitudes (leader evaluations, issue proximity, economic assessments) and voters' changing patterns of propensities to vote in both an electoral and a non-electoral context. The latter scenario serves as a means to rule out the potentially contaminating effect of voting choices on voters' PTVs. The data comes from two panel surveys of Italian voters conducted by ITANES in occasion of the 2006 general election, and in 2011 (that is, in a non-electoral year) respectively.

Paper prepared for delivery at ELECDEM final conference "Advancing Electoral Research", European University Institute, Florence, 28-30 June 2012. ; PTV measures are ever more commonly used in electoral research as a measure of electoral utilities. Yet a growing literature employs them as dependent variable in the voting equation in place of the lower information granted by vote recall questions. However, this choice can be seen as problematic because of the very structure of election survey research. To the extent that voters' PTVs are measured in post-election surveys (as it is often the case), these are likely to result endogenously produced by actual voting behavior in the past election – thus partly undermining the validity of the PTV question which, ideally, should not be related to any specific election (van der Eijk et al., 2006: 433). In this paper, we try to disentangle the relationship between short-term political attitudes (e.g., leader evaluations, issue proximity, economic assessments) and voters' changing patterns of propensiti(es) to vote in both an electoral and a non-electoral context. The latter scenario serves as a means to rule out the potentially contaminating effect of voting choices on voters' PTVs. The data comes from two panel surveys of Italian voters conducted by ITANES in occasion of the 2006 general election, and 2011 (that is, in a non-electoral year) respectively.