Vincenzo Emanuele

LUISS Guido Carli, Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali | Luiss · Department of Political Science

Despite considerable attention in the literature, existing studies analyzing the effect of left governmental power on inequalities suffer from three main limitations: a privileged focus on economic forms of inequality at the expense of political and social ones, inaccurate measurements of left governmental power, and a narrow timespan of the analys...

In recent years, a growing body of literature has revived its interest in social democratic parties, emphasising their allegedly irreversible crisis in Western Europe. However, all such accounts focus solely on electoral results, thus neglecting governmental power, the decisive factor to realise social democratic parties’ policy goals. To address t...

Description This dataset provides data on ideological polarization in Western Europe. It is based on parties' left-right placement provided by several expert surveys. Then, it uses Dalton's polarization index (2008) to calculate the polarization score in terms of votes and seats for each election. The dataset covers 20 Western European countries si...

Despite the huge amount of studies on cleavages, scholars have never elaborated a dynamic model to conceptualize and measure the stages of electoral development of the class cleavage and, specifically, the stage corresponding to its full electoral structuring. To fill this gap, by combining some key electoral properties of the class cleavage, I bui...

The 2022 Italian general election marked a new step in the unprecedented instability experienced by the Italian party system over the past 15 years. This article presents and discusses the outcome of the election within the deinstitutionalised Italian party system. The most remarkable results were the unprecedented success of the radical-right FDI...

Introduction Palermo is a political laboratory. It presents a clear moderate-conservative profile regarding voting behaviour since the early stages of Italy’s democratic instauration. After a continued centrality of Christian Democracy (DC) in the so-called First Republic and despite a structural advantage of centre-right political formations sinc...

Uno degli aspetti più discussi in questi giorni sul voto di domenica 25 settembre riguarda il consenso dei partiti italiani sul territorio. La meridionalizzazione del Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S), l'arretramento verso Nord della Lega dopo l'espansione di questi anni a Sud del Po e perfino del Tevere e la debolezza del Partito Democratico (PD) al d...

The comparative study of intraparty divisions and their determinants has been a long-debated matter, but some issues remain unresolved. First, the problem of the empirical identification of intraparty groups. Second, the lack of comparative perspective and large-N cross-country and cross-time analyses, given intraparty divisions have been studied m...

Technocracy has recently triggered growing scholarly interest, especially as an alternative form of ruling to both party government and populism. In the context of weakened parties-citizens links and increasing external constraints faced by Western European ruling parties, technocratic appointments might help deal with the responsibility-responsive...

This book offers a systematic and far-reaching account of party system institutionalization in Western Europe. Drawing upon a wide array of data and through a comparison of 20 countries from the end of WWII to 2019 across three arenas of party competition (electoral, parliamentary, and governmental ones), the empirical analysis shows that, over the...

This chapter investigates the consequences of party system deinstitutionalization on democracy. Specifically, it investigates whether and to what extent the recent wave of party system deinstitutionalization has been affecting both ‘subjective’ democracy (i.e., democracy as citizens perceive it) and ‘objective’ democracy (i.e., democracy as it corr...

This chapter is devoted to analyzing the explanatory factors of PSI. It raises hypotheses related to the cleavage structure, the timing of the democratic onset, the state of the economy, and the political-institutional characteristics. Data shows that PSI is mainly a function of structural determinants such as the strength of cleavages, the fragmen...

The chapter focuses on the success of new parties and their impact on their respective party systems. It provides a definition and a consistent operationalization of ‘new party’ based on the criterion of ‘organizational newness’. Then, it analyzes the electoral and parliamentary performances of new parties and assesses whether and how the different...

This chapter develops a synthetic index of PSI. This index is a measure ranging from 0 to 100 that takes into account the three fundamental dimensions that are at the core of its theoretical definition (stability, predictability, and time), alongside the three arenas where patterns of interparty competition take place (electoral, parliamentary, and...

This chapter shifts the focus to governments. Starting from Mair’s concepts of closure and openness, we analyze trends and variations in governmental properties such as alternation, innovation, and formula. We find that the governmental arena seems to tell a somewhat different story compared to the electoral and parliamentary ones. Here, a certain...

This chapter questions whether and to what extent Western European countries have been experiencing patterns of instability and unpredictability at the electoral and parliamentary levels. The empirical analysis held across 376 elections and legislatures held in 20 Western European countries in the period 1946–2019 shows that a general shift towards...

This concluding chapter summarizes the findings of the book and puts forward some final reflections for future research on this topic. The main finding of the book is that Western European party systems have been experiencing a process of deinstitutionalization in the last decades, showing increasingly unstable and unpredictable patterns of interpa...

This chapter critically reviews and discusses the current state of the art in the literature about party system institutionalization and provides a reconceptualization that is devoted to distinguishing this concept from the broader—and often misused—concept of party system change. Following this conceptual clarification, the chapter proposes an ori...

At the 2018 general election, Italy's two main populist parties, the Five-star Movement (M5s) and the League (Lega), achieved unprecedented success. They secured an absolute majority of votes and seats and eventually gave birth to the first government in Western Europe to be composed entirely of populist parties. Although the two parties are today...

Western Europe has recently experienced the emergence of successful new parties, but while single parties or countries have been extensively studied, insufficient attention has been devoted to this phenomenon from a comparative and long-term perspective. By relying on an original data set covering 20 countries and 344 parliamentary elections, this...

I investigate whether the strength of the class cleavage in Western Europe still "translates" into the electoral mobilization of the left. This research question is addressed through comparative longitudinal analysis in nineteen Western European countries after World War II. In particular, the impact of class cleavage is investigated by disentangli...

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 het...

Over recent years, a new transnational conflict has been deemed to be structuring political conflict in Europe. Several scholars have posited the emergence of a new 'demarcation' vs. 'integration' cleavage, pitting the 'losers' and 'winners' of globalization against each other. This new conflict is allegedly structured along economic (free trade an...

The European Parliament elections of 2019 in Italy can be considered as a crucial turning point for the national political system. Indeed, both the balance of power among parties and the governmental dynamics were deeply affected by the outcome of the 2019 elections. In a context of notable electoral instability, an almost perfect turnaround among...

Since 2013, the Italian party system has been in turmoil as the old bipolar structure has been swept away by the emergence of new competitors and skyrocketing voter volatility. Instead of being characterized by stabilization, the 2018 general election continued to show turmoil, with a substantial shift in the balance of power among parties and elec...

The 2018 Italian election produced striking results, with both a historic success for the two challenger parties (League and M5S) and massive defeats for the two mainstream parties (PD and FI). This article analyses party campaign strategies and their consistency with the opportunity structures provided by the configuration of Italian public opinio...

In recent years, and particularly following the impact of the “great recession”, Western European party systems have undergone profound change. New parties have emerged and been successful, thus radically changing the structure of inter-party competition. So far, research on new parties has been mainly conducted from party-level and election-centre...

This chapter deals with the analysis of party system change in Europe after the 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections. Our task is threefold. First, we explore the patterns of electoral instability in Europe at the 2019 EP elections and compare them across countries and over time. Second, we compare trends and variations in electoral instability...

La procedura di elezione del segretario del Partito Democratico si configura come una "selezione a più fasi" (Venturino, 2014). Quelle che comunemente sono chiamate primarie per la leadership rappresentano, perciò, solo una parte di un più ampio processo elettorale costituito, in prima battuta, dal voto degli iscritti, la cui fondamentale funzione...

Le elezioni del 2018 hanno confermato il carattere triadico del sistema partitico, con tre poli antagonisti, dotati di un sostegno elettorale distribuito in maniera territorialmente disomogenea che li vede prevalere o, comunque, registrare risultati notevolmente migliori in tre diverse aree del paese. L’indice aggregato di volatilità subisce una dr...

The literature on party system change and electoral volatility in post-communist Europe tends to make a clear-cut distinction between Central and Eastern European (CEE) party systems and Western European (WE) ones. The former are unstable and unpredictable and electoral volatility is driven by the continuous emergence of new political parties. Conv...

The 2018 Italian general elections were a crucial test to assess the resilience of mainstream parties vis-à-vis the challenge provided by populist forces and the stabilisation of the tripolar party system emerged in 2013. The article analyses the outcome of the election, whose most remarkable result was the unprecedented success of two populist par...

Five years after the ‘electoral earthquake’ of 2013 (Chiaramonte and De Sio 2014), when the rise of the largest genuinely new political party that had ever appeared in Western Europe led to the collapse of the bipolar pattern of party competition that had characterized the so-called Second Republic (Bordignon and Ceccarini 2013; Maggini 2014; Chiar...

Reduce dal 'terremoto elettorale' del 2013, il sistema partitico italiano, lungi dall'assestarsi, ha subito un'ulteriore violenta scossa nelle elezioni del 2018. Più violenta di quanto fosse nelle attese della vigilia. A dispetto della riconferma di un assetto tripolare - comunque di per sé non scontata a distanza di cinque anni, tenuto conto che i...

Over the last decades, Western European party systems have experienced growing levels of electoral volatility and the recurring emergence of successful new parties. This evidence calls into question the issue of party system institutionalization (PSI), a topic taken for granted so far in Western Europe, following the conventional wisdom that party...

Review of Italian elections, regional elections in Sicily of 5 November 2017

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 het...

Vincenzo Emanuele interviewed by Gianmarco Botti about the Party system (de-)institutionalization project

Despite the large body of literature on the emergence and success of new political parties in Western Europe, few, if any, attention has been paid to investigate new parties from a systemic perspective, therefore exploring their potential effects on party systems. This article focuses on party system innovation (PSInn), defined as the aggregate lev...

This article analyses how personal vote shapes electoral competition and predicts electoral results in a regional de-institutionalized party system. After having analysed the connection between unpredictable political environment and personal vote, we build an original empirical model that explores preferential vote and patterns of re-candidacies a...

In the wake of the harshest economic crisis since 1929, in several European countries there has been a rise of Eurosceptic parties that oppose EU integration. The 2014 European Parliament elections were a fundamental turning point for these parties. In this article, after a theoretical discussion on the concept of Euroscepticism, we provide an upda...

In the wake of the harshest economic crisis since 1929, in several European countries there has been a rise of Eurosceptic parties that oppose EU integration. The 2014 European Parliament elections were a fundamental turning point for these parties. In this article, after a theoretical discussion on the concept of Euroscepticism, we provide an upda...

Il successo del Movimento 5 Stelle, con le vittorie storiche di Roma e Torino; le difficoltà del centrosinistra, con il PD di Renzi che subisce per la prima volta una pesante battuta d’arresto; la tenuta del centrodestra che dimostra, quando è unito, di essere ancora un polo competitivo. Il tutto in un contesto di crescente astensionismo, volatilit...

Review of Italian elections, municipal elections of 2016

Il successo del Movimento 5 Stelle, con le vittorie storiche di Roma e Torino; le difficoltà del centrosinistra, con il PD di Renzi che subisce per la prima volta una pesante battuta d’arresto; la tenuta del centrodestra che dimostra, quando è unito, di essere ancora un polo competitivo. Il tutto in un contesto di crescente astensionismo, volatilit...

La rilevazione semestrale sulle opinioni politiche degli italiani effettuata dal CISE per il Sole 24 Ore fotografa i cambiamenti in atto nell'opinione pubblica e offre importanti spunti di riflessione e dibattito. Come emerso dall'articolo di D'Alimonte già pubblicato qui (link), la principale novità del sondaggio riguarda la crescita del Movimento...

In the last decades many scholars have underlined the growing importance of leaders and candidates in party organizations and party competition and also in voting behavior. A relevant number of contributions has focused on candidate-oriented voting and even on the everlasting role of clientelism and patronage in shaping electoral politics, especial...

This dataset provides data on electoral volatility and its internal components in parliamentary elections (lower house) of 19 Western European countries for the 1945-2015 period. It covers the entire universe of Western European elections held after World War II under democratic regimes. Data for Greece, Portugal and Spain have been collected after...

Despite a great flourishing of studies about Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, the issue of party system institutionalization has been widely neglected in Western Europe, where the presence of stable and predictable patterns of interactions among political actors has been generally taken for granted for a long time. Nevertheless, party...

The nationalisation of politics is a major political phenomenon deriving from the historical trend towards the formation of national electorates and party systems brought about by the progressive reduction in the significance of territorial cleavages. During the last 50 years, though the issue of vote nationalisation has been addressed by a large v...

This article has the purpose to assess if and how party system nationalization affects individual voting behaviour. Previous studies on party system nationalization have focused on systemic processes, exclusively dealing with aggregate data. The authors address this topic from a new empirical perspective, arguing that party system nationalization c...

2014 regional election 2014 administrative election

In Francia si è votato domenica 25 maggio 1. La Francia elegge 74 eurodeputa-ti (due in più rispetto al 2009) tramite sistema proporzionale con sbarramento al 5% e liste chiuse 2 : sono i partiti politici a stabilire l'ordine dei candidati, dunque gli elettori esprimono solo il voto per un partito e non per specifici candidati. I seggi sono quindi...

The 2012 municipal election in Palermo produced an unexpected outcome. In the Sicilian city - for a long time a conservative stronghold- the center-right candidate, Massimo Costa did not succeed to reach the second ballot and the election was won by the former Major Leoluca Orlando, supported by a radical left coalition. Orlando prevailed with a se...

In 2011 Italian local elections we observed high electoral mobility: in Milan, for example, the center-left gained his first-time victory in the Berlusconi era, while in Naples there was a significant split voting in the first round and a huge turnaround between the first and the second ballot. A general research question emerged: are the shifts in...