Suchergebnisse

First published online: 06 December 2018 ; The 2013 election had heralded an unprecedented tripolar era for Italian politics, with the two traditional forces of the Second Italian Republic (Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right and variously assorted centre-left alliances) eventually matched, in terms of size, by the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) – to date, the most successful rookie of Italian politics with 25% of valid votes at its first national election (Garzia 2013). Such an impressive result, although insufficient to grant it the majority bonus in the Lower Chamber, had nonetheless been enough to complicate, to a large extent, the formation of a parliamentary majority. Indeed, the problematic nature of the electoral outcome resulted in a correspondingly long process of government formation, which took over two months.

First published online: 02 February 2017 ; Previous studies have portrayed the personalisation of politics as a consequence of changes in the electoral market and the resulting transformations at the party level. However, empirical research has not reached a consensus on the degree to which this process has had an impact on citizens' voting choices. An emerging body of comparative literature would seem to support the idea that party-leader evaluations have become an actual driver of partisanship at the individual level. However, existing evidence on the topic is placed in some doubt by the cross-sectional design used. To the extent that both the dependent variable (i.e. partisanship) and the main predictor (e.g. leader evaluations) are measured at the same point in time, the causal dynamics underlying the relationship between partisanship and leader evaluations remain unclear. Against this background, this article takes advantage of a unique panel dataset assembled for the Italian National Election Study (ITANES) in November and December 2013. The time-frame of the survey allows for an unprecedented causal assessment of the effect of leadership changes (the PD and the LN) as well as party-label changes (from the PdL to FI and the NCD) on patterns of closeness to parties at the individual level. The results shed new light on the changing relationship between voters and Italian political parties, ever more focussed upon their leaders and their characteristics.

First published online: 02 November 2017 ; This paper provides an empirical assessment of the relationship between media exposure and leader effects on voting through an analysis of Italy––an ideal case for the study of the personalization of politics and its connection with political communication. The results show the dominance of leader effects among voters strongly exposed to television and a somewhat differentiated impact on Internauts. By looking at leader effects across different audiences, this paper elaborates on the missing link between electoral research and political communication, and it eventually speaks to the broader question of how important media is for the outcome of contemporary democratic elections.

First published online: October 2013 ; Nowadays it is commonplace to argue that candidates' personal characteristics play a large part in determining how individuals vote. In the domain of political marketing this assumption is often given for granted, and no clear conceptual understanding of how image crafting techniques affect voters has emerged. This article is an attempt to link political marketing's concern for impression management strategies with our knowledge of leader effects in democratic elections. A counterfactual analysis of post-election survey data from the last three Italian elections demonstrates that political candidates can actually gain votes—and at times win elections—due to the way in which their personality profile is perceived by voters.

First published online : September 2013 ; This article investigates the attitudinal drivers of partisanship in Western Europe, focusing in particular on the role exerted by voters' evaluation of party leaders. The cross-sectional analysis is performed on pooled national election study data from three established parliamentary democracies (Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands). Results highlight the growing statistical association between leader evaluations and voters' feelings of partisan attachment throughout the last three decades. Further analyses of selected panel data provide evidence for a causal interpretation in which voters' evaluation of party leaders plays a crucial role in shaping their feelings of attachment to parties.

Article first published online: 17 OCT 2012 ; This article investigates the effects of the deep transformations in the relationship between West European class-mass parties and their electorates. Particular attention is paid to the changing nature of individuals' partisan attachments, which are hypothesized to be less rooted in social and ideological identities and more in individual attitudes towards increasingly visible partisan objects. The main objective of this article is to examine the influence of voters' attitudes towards one of these "objects"—the party leaders—in determining psychological attachments with the parties. The analysis concentrates on the two main cleavage-based parties in Britain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. The empirical findings highlight the declining ability of social identities (class and religious) to predict individual feelings of partisan attachment, as well as the growing influence of voters' attitudes towards party leaders. The concluding section points to the crucial role that political psychology can play in our understanding of democratic elections' outcomes.