Abstract
Motivated by the need to understand voting behaviour under different electoral rules, Laslier et al. (Eur Union Polit, 16(4):601–615, 2015) have conducted an online experiment, the EuroVotePlus experiment, focusing on the effects of the different rules adopted to elect members of the European parliament on voters’ behaviour. The experiment took place in several European countries in the 3 weeks before the 2014 elections for the European Parliament. This paper focuses on the Italian data. Firstly, we show that the behaviour of Italian respondents is consistent with the empirical findings at the European level. Then, we exploit the change from open list to closed list elections implemented in Italy in 1993 to investigate whether and how preferences over institutions are affected by experience. We find that respondents who voted using the open list system in Italy are more likely to prefer closed list systems, and that the effect is stronger the higher the number of open list elections the respondents have faced.
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Notes
A more extensive description of the experimental and electoral rules is provided in Sect. 2.
In the online experiment, the possibility of endorsing a candidate or crossing out his name was induced as follows: each of the ten candidates in the chosen list was given one point by the computer; the respondent could then endorse the candidate adding an extra point, or cross out the candidate removing the point already assigned.
Gender = 1 for female respondents.
Such indicators are based on the three following questions:
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(i)
From 0 to 10, how satisfied are you with democracy at European level?
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(ii)
If 0 indicates you only feel Italian and 5 only European, where do you place yourself?
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(iii)
From 0 to 5, how sure are you sure that you will vote in the next European Parliament election?
Responses to questions (i–iii) are used to construct the variables EuDemo, EuFeeling and EuTurnout, respectively.
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(i)
We highlight that in the replication of Bol et al. (2016) we cannot introduce one of their main controls, which is the dummy Consistent indicating if the pan-European list vote is consistent with the vote cast by the respondents in the national ballot (i.e. same party group), as national ballots were not introduced in the Italian version of EVP.
If we consider the full EVP sample including all European countries, the percentage of respondents approving of pan-European lists is almost 60%. The null hypothesis of equal means between the percentage of people that approve the pan-European lists in Italy and in the rest of Europe can be rejected at the 1% level.
In our sample the votes in the open list systems are distributed as follows: 18.83% negative votes, 20.96% positive votes and 60.21% neutral votes. The candidate’s position within the party-list seems to have no effect on the decision of the voters, as 48% of the endorsed candidates are located in the first five positions on the list.
The number ranges from zero to six.
Note that party lists have been randomly assembled by the roster of existing MEPs; thus, parties with lower female representation would naturally provide fewer potential female candidates for the experiment.
The Conservatives and Reformists party group is the control group.
Ginsborg (2001), p. 173.
The questionnaire asks respondents to express their opinion about the proposed electoral systems on a scale between 0 and 5. We exploit this information to build three binary variables indicating if the respondent strictly prefers open lists over closed list, or viceversa, or if the respondent is indifferent between the two.
We drop respondents born in 1974 as we do not know their month of birth.
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The authors thanks André Blais, Damien Bol, Michela Cella, Jean-Francois Laslier, Ornella Lepre and three anonymous referees for useful comments.
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Bettarelli, L., Iannantuoni, G., Manzoni, E. et al. Voters’ preferences and electoral systems: the EuroVotePlus experiment in Italy. Econ Polit 34, 159–177 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40888-016-0046-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40888-016-0046-y