Beyond "position" and "valence". A unified framework for the analysis of political issues

Starting from a review of models of positional and valence issues, the paper – by tapping into the original definition of valence issue – introduces a classification of issues based on their level of overall, dychotomic agreement. This allows the placement of both positional and valence issues on a same continuum. A second dimension is then introduced, which identifies how much specific issues are over- or undersupported within a specific party. A visual classification of issues based on these two dimensions (the AP diagram) is then introduced, highlighting risks and opportunities for a party in campaigning on specific issues. Specific indicators (namely, issue yield) and hypotheses derived from the AP model are tested on survey data from the EU Profiler project, which collected issue profiles of Internet users from the 27 EU Countries before the EP 2009 Elections. The results show that the suggested dimensions and indicators identify a wide cross-country and cross-issue variance. Also, indicators generated by the AP model are powerful predictors of issue saliency, even subsuming traditional Downsean indicators.political issues; valence; position; party competition; European elections

Political Involvement and Electoral Competition

Recent literature highlights how political knowledge and involvement matter for most political attitudes. Political involvement is here proposed as a second "spatial" dimension, orthogonally complementing left-right ideological positions of citizens. In such a space, a logical quantitative model is developed, hypothesizing that more involved citizens cast votes in a heavily structured manner, strongly connected to their overall ideological orientation, while less involved citizens present higher probabilities of voting for a party that apparently contradicts their self-declared ideological orientation. This logical quantitative model is then applied to data from the Italian National Election Studies 2001 survey. Results confirm the hypothesis, and show that the "competitive area", where voting probabilities are similar for both major blocs, is spatially quite narrow for very involved citizens, and significantly "widens" as the level of involvement decreases. Separate analyses are then carried out for different geo-political areas of the country, with interesting results

Un anno di elezioni verso le Politiche 2013

Tre importanti eventi vanno analizzati per poter inquadrare al meglio le elezioni politiche del 24 e 25 febbraio 2013. Le elezioni politiche in Spagna, Francia, Grecia e Olanda che si sono svolte tra la fine del 2011 e la fine del 2012 hanno fatto registrare importanti cambiamenti politici nei singoli contesti locali con inevitabili ripercussioni a livello europeo. Le elezioni regionali in Sicilia sono state una fondamentale tappa di avvicinamento alle elezioni politiche italiane, segnando di fatto \u2013 con la sconfitta del centrodestra e il grande successo del Movimento Cinque Stelle \u2013 l\u2019inizio della campagna elettorale. Infine le elezioni primarie e le parlamentarie del centrosinistra hanno contribuito a rendere pi\uf9 chiaro il quadro dell\u2019offerta politica, nonch\ue9 a rimobilitare una quota consistente dell\u2019elettorato italiano in vista delle prossime elezioni. L\u2019analisi di questi tre gruppi di consultazioni permette quindi di delineare il contesto \u2013 nazionale ed internazionale \u2013 di interpretazione per le imminenti elezioni politiche del 24 e 25 febbraio. \uc8 quanto cerca di fare questo Terzo Dossier CISE che raccoglie tutte le analisi, gi\ue0 pubblicate sul sito web CISE tra la fine del 2011 e l\u2019inizio del 2013, di questi tre gruppi di consultazioni. Analisi basate su dati aggregati, stime di flussi elettorali e indagini demoscopiche dell\u2019Osservatorio Politico CISE, con la finalit\ue0 di fornire strumenti utili per interpretare correttamente il contesto di avvicinamento ad un voto cruciale per il nostro paese

An evaluation of the performance and suitability of R\ua0 7\ua0C methods for ecological inference with known true values

Ecological inference refers to the study of individuals using aggregate data and it is used in an impressive number of studies; it is well known, however, that the study of individuals using group data suffers from an ecological fallacy problem (Robinson in Am Sociol Rev 15:351\u2013357, 1950). This paper evaluates the accuracy of two recent methods, the Rosen et al. (Stat Neerl 55:134\u2013156, 2001) and the Greiner and Quinn (J R Stat Soc Ser A (Statistics in Society) 172:67\u201381, 2009) and the long-standing Goodman\u2019s (Am Sociol Rev 18:663\u2013664, 1953; Am J Sociol 64:610\u2013625, 1959) method designed to estimate all cells of R 7 C tables simultaneously by employing exclusively aggregate data. To conduct these tests we leverage on extensive electoral data for which the true quantities of interest are known. In particular, we focus on examining the extent to which the confidence intervals provided by the three methods contain the true values. The paper also provides important guidelines regarding the appropriate contexts for employing these models

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

Numeri e dati alla mano, ecco il voto degli italiani per Regioni e referendum

Il divario tra dati e rappresentazione nei media. Un'indagine sulla composizione del voto alle ultime elezioni regionali e al referendum costituzionale