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Despite growing attention to electoral brands, political scientists have largely remained "color blind," neglecting parties' chromatic choices. Moreover, scholars dedicated limited attention to how party organizations converge on the use of similar structures and communication strategies, thereby engaging in a process of institutional isomorphism. We seek to simultaneously fill both gaps by examining the logos of more than 300 parties in 35 democracies during the latest political elections. Our findings show that a strong relationship exists between ideology and the use of certain color hues: left-wing party logos mainly display hues at the red end of the color spectrum, while blue hues prevail among right-wing parties. Likeminded parties' chromatic isomorphism, however, is moderated by country and party-specific factors. Notably, the correlation between color hue and ideology is stronger in Western Europe and among older parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis of issue emphasis on Twitter by the seven main German parties during the 2017 federal election campaign underlines the importance of taking a time-sensitive approach when investigating issue competition. We show that the attention parties give to issues they are associated with fluctuates frequently on social media and alternates with other thematic priorities that may not be 'owned'. In the digital age, therefore, established theories of issue ownership come under pressure. Our findings reveal that short-term issue emphasis is driven by exogenous shocks and spatial considerations. The exact mechanism behind parties' decisions to emphasise a specific issue in the short run depends on the type of issue in focus. Communication on economic left-right and socio-cultural issues is shaped by different strategies. Our study reveals that when studying issue competition online different policy dimensions need to be distinguished just as the temporal dynamics need to be understood. This needs to be done instead of aggregating data to give a holistic account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research highlights that ideology decisively affects political contestation concerning peace and security operations in European countries. In particular, recent studies suggest that party preferences on this issue follow a curvilinear distribution along the left-right axis, delineating a conflict between moderate and extreme parties. However, the impact of this cleavage on the use of strategic narratives to either support or criticize these missions requires more attention. This article aims to fill this gap by employing seeded latent Dirichlet allocation, a semi-supervised automated text analysis method, to analyze parliamentary debates on Italy's most significant troop deployments between 1994 and 2013. We expect to find that while moderates express a supportive narrative aimed at justifying the use of force, extremists attempt to delegitimize military interventions. Accordingly, we hypothesize that moderate parties emphasize more on the multilateral and humanitarian framework of a mission, while extremist parties focus more on its military means. The empirical findings largely confirm our hypotheses. By means of its method and results, the article contributes both empirically and methodologically to the debate on the party politics of military interventions in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populist radical right (PRR) parties tend to stress their differences from other parties. Yet at the same time, PRR parties have increasingly sought to integrate into party systems across the globe. In seeking to understand the way that PRR parties negotiate this paradoxical situation, the literature tends to focus on their policy offerings or discourse. We, on the contrary, investigate an underestimated aspect of their political communication: their visuals. Namely, we focus on the question of if and how PRR parties communicate their similarities or differences from other parties via the color profiles of their logos, given that color is a key way that political parties can signal (a) their ideological commitments (via hue) and (b) their approach to “valence” considerations (via saturation). We expect PRR parties’ attempts to signal their integration into party systems to be mainly sought via saturation, as a proxy for valence perceptions related to parties’ seriousness and competence, while we expect them to signal their difference from other parties via hue, given the incentive for PRR parties to communicate their ideological distance from non-populist parties as a marker of distinctiveness in the political market. We test our research questions by analyzing parties’ logos across 35 democracies in recent elections. Results largely confirm our expectations, demonstrating the utility of focusing on the visual aspects of PRR parties’ political communication. Interestingly, the results do not replicate if we focus on populist parties beyond the PRR party family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates whether there are specific spatial conditions that make a party more likely to pay closer attention to anti-elite rhetoric than to alternative issues in its political confrontation with other parties. The article first treats anti-elitism as a non-policy vote-winning strategy that could be valued positively by a broad class of voters across ideological lines (its 'quasi-valence' attribute). It is then shown that the incentive of a party to embrace such a strategy grows as the ideological space separating that party from the other(s) shrinks. This hypothesis receives empirical support from the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey Data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article sheds light on two missing links in the existing literature on government's policy preferences and policy choices, namely the roles played by party factions and trade unions as political actors able to affect government's decision-making power. The content analysis of a wide typology of documents (i.e., investiture speeches, parliamentary debates, motions discussed during parties' and trade unions' congresses) allows to locate cabinets, parties, party factions and trade unions on a common pro-state/pro-market scale. Using these new data sources, we perform a multivariate time-series analysis to estimate the relative impact of those political actors on social expenditure in Italy throughout its modern history (1946–2015). The results support the idea that intra-party dynamics and trade unions' preferences do matter. Indeed, government's ability to retrench the welfare state vanishes when the Prime Minister's party is highly polarized internally and when trade unions are more cohesive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the relationship between the incentives of parties to campaign on valence issues and the ideological proximity between one party and its competitors. Building from the existing literature, we provide a novel theoretical model that investigates this relationship in a two-dimensional multiparty system. Our theoretical argument is then tested focusing on the 2014 European electoral campaign in the five largest European countries, through an analysis of the messages posted by parties in their official Twitter accounts. Our results highlight an inverse relationship between a party’s distance from its neighbors and its likelihood to emphasize valence issues. However, as suggested in our theoretical framework, this effect is statistically significant only with respect to valence positive campaigning. Our findings have implications for the literature on valence competition, electoral campaigns, and social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By making use of an original data-set built based on a codification of all investiture debates of the Italian governments from 1946 to 2014, the paper investigates the main factors that explain the choice of a party to devote its attention to the valence issues of corruption and competence in its legislative speeches. Two classes of hypotheses are tested; the first concentrates on spatial reasons, and the second concentrates on contextual factors. Both sets of factors appear to play a significant role, although no clear temporal trend emerges in party attention over almost seventy years of Italian parliamentary debates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite a growing interest in investigating the causes of political corruption, far less attention has been devoted to analysing the conditions under which political actors have an incentive to highlight corruption in electoral competition. Do parties talk about corruption just as a reaction to exogenous factors (i.e. scandals reported in the press)? Or are there systematic patterns in the way parties emphasize this issue during campaigns? Assuming that corruption is a valence issue (i.e. an issue universally supported/disclaimed by electors), we put our investigation in the framework of a one-dimensional model and hypothesize that spatial considerations can affect parties’ incentives to emphasize corruption issues. Empirical analysis based on CMP data shows that such an incentive exists for both cabinet and non-cabinet parties, and increases with proximity on the ideological scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acknowledging the role played by character valence issues in affecting parties’ fortunes, several recent papers have investigated the possible intentional use of such issues in electoral contests. A corollary of this line of research has focused on identifying conditions under which parties are expected to invest more in valence campaigning. In this article, we focus on the role played by parties’ relative ideological positions in a multiparty setting. We identify the existence of an inverse relationship between the distance of a party from its ideologically adjacent competitors and its incentive to campaign on character valence issues. However, the extent of this relationship can be conditional on institutional and electoral factors. We test these hypotheses by focusing on the emphasis a party places in its electoral manifestos on the specific character valence issue of corruption. Statistical results largely confirm our hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We apply the iterative algorithm by Merrill and Adams (Political Analysis 9:347-361, ) to compute the optimal positions of vote-maximizing parties along a one-dimensional space for a large number of elections. This allows us to systematically evaluate factors that push parties toward more centrifugal locations in equilibrium. Our findings largely corroborate expectations suggested by the theoretical literature, albeit with one notable exception: the relative size of a partisan constituency reduces, rather than enhances, the likelihood of a party having an extreme optimal position. We then compare derived equilibrium positions with actual party positions, with the aim of understanding the nature of electoral incentives and offering insights about party-system competition. In particular, we show that the age of a party, the party family to which it belongs, post-election expectations, and internal rules for candidate and leader selection, are all factors that increase the probability of a party approaching the position predicted by pure vote-maximizing considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its theoretical relevance, the role played by the existence of a core party in explaining the partisan composition of governments represents an understudied area in the empirical research on coalition formations. This article addresses the gap in the literature by focusing on the Italian case between 1946–1993. The role of the core party not only finds corroboration in the data, but it also clarifies the role played by political inertia. In this sense, the nature of the cabinet-bargaining process appears to be qualitatively different when a core party is present. Beyond better accounting for the patterns of government formation, our results help to identify the necessary (spatial) conditions under which the cycle of a government formula can be expected to be broken. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Italian Law-Making Archive (ILMA) is a relational database that combines information on the legislation, legislative initiative, legislative processes, parliamentarians and government members and policy positions of parties present in different legislatures and governments. It covers a period that extends from the beginning of the 10th legislature of the Italian Republic in 1987 to the end of the 15th legislature in 2008. In contrast to commonly available data sources, records are non-redundantly stored in the database, are organized in different tables characterized by unique keys, and are linked to each other by relations, thus permitting scholars to extract, through queries on a specific web interface, only those data necessary for their empirical studies. This article aims at presenting ILMA and its main components. We describe the type of data it contains, the sources from which these data have been drawn and the procedures used to aggregate available information in a unique and comprehensive database. In the second part of the paper, we offer some practical applications for potential use of the database for quantitative studies of the Italian legislative process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The large literature on legislative party unity identifies the confidence relationship, i.e. the threat of being voted out of office and losing agenda setting powers, as well as cabinet membership, as two crucial institutional sources of party discipline. However, by focusing on the dramatic change in the Italian political system following the 1994 election, the article shows that the impact of these factors on party unity (and the direction of this impact) hinge crucially on the possibility of government alternation rather than mere cabinet turnover. This is illustrated by an index of party unity that explicitly focuses on the behaviour of individual MPs derived from a roll-call analysis of the Italian Chamber of Deputies during the period 1988–2008. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During its nearly fifty years of history, the First Italian Republic has been characterised by the highest rate of cabinet turnover in Western Europe. There are several convincing explanations for this exceptional feature; nevertheless, merely looking at the average figure risks overlooking the variety in the Italian government experience. Focusing on the spatial determinants of Italian cabinet duration shows that the presence of a core party has a positive, albeit conditional, impact on government duration, largely depending on the degree of intra-cabinet conflict. Moreover, whenever the core is absent, the inability of cabinets to change the status quo appears to lengthen, rather than shorten, their duration. This outcome appears in line with works stressing the substantial policy immobilism of Italian governments throughout most of the postwar period. The analysis relies on a new dataset based on a coding of the investiture debates of all the Italian cabinets. This allows one to track the evolution of parties' preferences in a policy space that can change between (rather than only across) elections. The results show the importance of in-depth case studies to better analyse some puzzles within the cabinet duration literature that might otherwise be averaged out in large- N comparative analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the possibility for the parties to invest in negative campaigning – a behavior that, in our framework, involves blaming alleged insufficiencies of the rival concerning commonly shared values. Within a simple one-dimensional model, we deduce the hypothesis that the parties’ incentive to “attack” each other increases with the parties’ proximity on the left–right space. We test our hypothesis on an Italian case, focusing on the emphasis placed by the Communist Party on political corruption issues during the government investiture debates that spanned from the postwar period until 1994, when the traditional party system abruptly collapsed. The statistical results are largely consistent with our theoretical insights. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Expert surveys have become increasingly popular among political scientists. One of the problems of using surveys (of any sort) to estimate party positions is that respondents can be influenced by their subjective political views. As a consequence, experts may give biased responses, and such (ideological) bias may affect certain parties more than others. In this paper, we use the latest expert survey of Benoit and Laver (2006) to unfold the ideal points of the respondents to the survey. By employing the estimated ideal points, we show that in almost 16 percent of the cases analyzed, there is evidence of an ideological bias in the experts' placements of parties along the left-right dimension, especially among right-wing parties (but not necessarily extreme-right parties). We examine two methods designed to generate less biased estimates. The first one is directly based on a regression technique, while the second is based on the negligibility of ideological bias in experts' answers to more specific policy questions. The paper concludes by examining the consequences of these findings for empirical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tracks a path from electoral results to government formation, in order to assess whether the characteristics of the party system put forward by the spatial theory of voting may influence, and how, the relationship between electoral system and government stability. In this regard we perform a simulation concerning the 2006 Italian general election, by computing the parliamentary seats that parties would get in an election through various electoral systems, starting from given electors' votes. We then introduce two well-known game theoretical models that explain stability and instability of coalition governments. We draw some counterfactual deductions about what would have occurred to Italian government stability if other electoral systems had been in use. The results of our simulation suggest that the stability consequences of technical changes in an electoral system are influenced by the spatial features of the party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of legislative party unity has received growing attention from scholars of comparative politics in recent years; however, the study of legislative party unity in the Italian context has been by and large excluded from most of the literature. The purpose of this article is to fill this gap by shedding light on the magnitude of the phenomenon of legislative voting defections and offering some possible explanations for these defections. Drawing on an original dataset spanning over three legislative terms (13th, 14th, and 15th), the results of this study suggest that the traditional image of Italian politics dominated by strong party organisations overwhelming the individual components of representation is to a large extent still valid, at least in the field of legislative voting. This does not mean that parties are able to perfectly control the parliamentary activity of their members. On the contrary, defections from the official party line are present in Italy as in other parliamentary democracies and here too they are driven by the structure of opportunities in which elected representatives operate. In particular, we show that individual characteristics have no discernable impact on legislative voting, while party reputation, inclusion in government coalitions, and the electoral system are all relevant factors in explaining the propensity of MPs to break party discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]