How do established voters react to new parties? : the case of Italy, 1985-2008
License
Access Rights
Cadmus Permanent Link
Full-text via DOI
ISBN
ISSN
0261-3794; 1873-6890
Issue Date
Type of Publication
LC Subject Heading
Other Topic(s)
EUI Research Cluster(s)
Initial version
Published version
Succeeding version
Preceding version
Published version part
Earlier different version
Initial format
Author(s)
Citation
Electoral studies, 2012, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 297-305
Cite
FRANKLIN, Mark N., VAN SPANJE, Joost, How do established voters react to new parties? : the case of Italy, 1985-2008, Electoral studies, 2012, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 297-305 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/33958
Abstract
The Italian party system largely collapsed in the early 1990s, providing us with a natural experimental situation in which voters were confronted with new parties - indeed, with an entirely new party system. How did they react? This paper develops a number of expectations on the basis of existing theory and tests these expectations using a dataset consisting of election studies conducted in Italy between 1985 and 2008. We find that a new party system causes confusion as to where parties stand in left-right terms, making it difficult for voters to make their choices on the basis of ideological cues. The confusion is greatest among older voters - those already set in their habits of voting, but only the very oldest cohorts (containing voters over 60 years old) are significantly debilitated. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.