Lorenzo De Sio

Issue Yield: A Model of Party Strategy in Multidimensional Space

Parties in pluralist democracies face numerous contentious issues, but most models of electoral competition assume a simple, often one-dimensional structure. We develop a new, inherently multidimensional model of party strategy in which parties compete by emphasizing policy issues. Issue emphasis is informed by two distinct goals: mobilizing the partys core voters and broadening the support base. Accommodating these goals dissolves the position-valence dichotomy through a focus on policies that unite the party internally while also attracting support from the electorate at large. We define issue yield as the capacity of an issue to reconcile these criteria, and then operationalize it as a simple index. Results of multilevel regressions combining population survey data and party manifesto scores from the 2009 European Election Study demonstrate that issue yield governs party strategy across different political contexts.

For a Few Votes More: The Italian General Elections of April 2006

Despite polls predicting a bigger victory, the Italian general elections of 2006 saw an extremely narrow victory by the centre-left coalition Unione, led by Romano Prodi. Electoral predictions had been based on the decreased popularity of the incumbent Berlusconi government over the previous five years. But Berlusconi showed great determination during the last months before the elections. He was able to pass a new electoral law and to conduct a very aggressive, mobilizing campaign, which allowed him to almost completely recover the gap. The result was also determined by the virtual disappearance of third forces, compared with 2001.

Strategic Incentives, Issue Proximity and Party Support in Europe

The Issue Yield model predicts that parties will choose specific issues to emphasise, based on the joint assessment of electoral risks (how divisive is an issue within the party support base) and electoral opportunities (how widely supported is the same issue outside the party). According to this model, issues with high yield are those that combine a high affinity with the existing party base, together with a high potential to reach new voters. In previous work, the model showed a remarkable ability to explain aggregate issue importance as reported by party supporters, as well as issue emphasis in party manifestos. This paper tests the implications at the individual level by comparing a conventional model where issue salience is determined from manifesto data with a revised model where issue salience is determined by issue yield. The empirical findings show that issue yield is a more effective criterion than manifesto emphasis for identifying the issues most closely associated with party support in the minds of voters.

Party placement in supranational elections : an introduction to the euandi 2014 dataset

Throughout the years, political scientists have devised a multitude of techniques to position political parties on various ideological and policy/issue dimensions. So far, however, none of these techniques was able to evolve into a “gold standard” in party positioning. Against this background, one could recently witness the appearance of a new methodology for party positioning tightly connected to the spread of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), i.e. an iterative method that aims at improving existing techniques using a combination of party self-placement and expert judgement. Such a method, as pioneered by the Dutch Kieskompas, was first systematically employed on a large cross-national scale by the EU Profiler VAA in the context of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. This article introduces the party placement datasets generated by euandi (reads: EU and I), a transnational VAA for the 2014 EP elections. The scientific relevance of the euandi endeavour lies primarily in its choice to stick to the iterative method of party positioning employed by the EU Profiler in 2009 as well as in the choice to keep as many as 17 policy statements in the 2014 questionnaire in order to allow for cross-national, longitudinal research on party competition in Europe across a five-year period. This article provides a brief review of traditional methods of party positioning and contrasts them to the iterative method employed by the euandi team. It then introduces the specifics of the project, facts and figures of the data collection procedure, and the details of the resulting dataset encompassing 242 parties from the whole EU28.

Issue Yield and Party Strategy in Multiparty Competition

The issue yield model introduced a theory of the herestethic use of policy issues as strategic resources in multidimensional party competition. We extend the model by systematically addressing the specificities of issue yield dynamics in multiparty systems, with special regard to parties’ issue yield rankings (relative position) and issue yield heterogeneity (differentiation) on each issue. Second, we introduce a novel research design for original data collection that allows for a more systematic testing of the model, by featuring (a) a large number of policy issues, (b) the use of Twitter content for coding parties’ issue emphasis, and (c) an appropriate time sequence for measuring issue yield configurations and issue emphasis. We finally present findings from a pilot implementation of such design, performed on the occasion of the 2014 European Parliament election in Italy. Findings confirm the soundness of the design and provide support for the newly introduced hypotheses about multiparty competition.

PTV gap as a new measure of partisanship: a panel-data, multi-measure validation showing surprising partisanship stability

ABSTRACT Comparative studies of partisanship lack a comparable transatlantic measure. In the U.S. the traditional ANES measure is used, while in European multi-party systems a party-closeness measure is mostly used. A recent contribution proposed PTV (propensity-to-vote) gap as a potential solution to this issue, showing that the gap in PTV scores between the best- and the second best-placed party has desirable properties in the American case. In this article we test the same measure on the multi-party case of Italy, using panel data from the CISE 2012–2013 Electoral Panel.The case is particularly relevant, given the turbulence experienced by the Italian party system at the time, with the emergence of important new parties. This makes this period a crucial test for performing a validation of party identification measures. Comparing the new measure with the traditional party-closeness measure, we show that: a) both measures are more stable than vote choice, in line with party identification theory, and contrary to previous research on other European multi-party systems; b) the two measures are virtually equivalent in terms of over-time stability. As a second comparative validation, we investigate the mutual effects relating partisanship and vote over time. Results show superiority for the PTV-gap measure, which has similar predictive power on vote choice, but in turn is predicted by it to a statistically inferior extent. As a result, we conclude that our validation of the PTV-gap measure– already successfully tested in the U.S. context – qualifies it as a productive tool for comparative research on partisanship.