Category Archives: election

Vote transfers between the parties, 2006-2008

Today’s Venerdi in Repubblica has gone to town on the basis of a study released by the Istituto Cattaneo. The study [PDF] is presented misleadingly: the magazine gives only one diagram (for Milan) but the Cattaneo study only gives vote transfers for a number of cities/areas - Milano, Brescia, Como, Varese, Bologna, Modena, and Reggio […]

The left loses Rome

Gianni Alemanno (ex-Fascist, subsequently AN, now PdL) has won the run-off election for the mayoralty of Rome. It’s a pretty poor result for the left, and a poor personal result for Rutelli - he didn’t do as well as his party colleague Nicola Zingaretti, who was running for the President of the Province of Rome […]

Blue-Red-Green-Cyan-Purple Italy

One of the blessings of a two party system is that you only need two colours to colour the political map.
Not so with Italy.
The PDF file linked to below contains five maps of support for each of the main parties; they’ve been scaled so that provinces with the highest share for that party have been […]

Where did the voters go?

I’ve been working on some ecological inference from the aggregate data on the Camera to individual vote switches. I’ve got a very early draft which I’m posting. Vote shifts, 2006-2008 needs some work, especially on the diagnostics for the two different models - but here’s the abstract:
Using data from exit polls and two different methods […]

2008 electoral data by comune, Camera

For those who are interested: 2008 electoral results by comune, Camera, zip file. The results were scraped from the Ministry of the Interior website using a quick Perl program, then transposed in R.

Election post-mortem #3: ups and downs in the regions

Four types of regions:

regions the PD + IdV did relatively well in - that is, regions in which they increased their vote by more than they did nationally, in order: Lazio, Marche, Toscana, Umbria.
regions the PD + IdV did relatively poorly in - that is, regions in which they increased their vote by less than […]

Election post-mortem #2: Sinistra Arcobaleno

I’m still trying to find out whether deluded former Communist voters switched to the Lega. Two points from today’s Repubblica:

“The Sinistra Arcobaleno has lost something like 2,395,932 votes compared to 2006. Bertinotti and co have seen almost 61.5% of the savings they have cashed in in 2006 disappeared. And, more worrying, this figure is the […]

Election post-mortem #1

Now that the final results are (almost) in, let’s take a look at what happened. Easing gently in, let’s start by comparing the poll averages with the final results for each party:

Party
Last point on the trend line
Actual vote-share, Camera
Difference

Sinistra Arcobaleno
6.863%
3.084%
-3.779

Partito Democratico
34.040%
33.174%
-0.876

Lega Nord
5.060%
8.297%
3.237%

Italia dei Valori
3.350%
4.371%
1.02%

Popolo delle Libertà
38.974%
37.388%
-1.58%

UDC
5.917%
5.624%
-0.294%

If there was no movement over the last two weeks […]

Live-blogging the election

2:45pm. Turnout was down four points on two years ago at ten o’clock last night.
Clemente Mastella is on Tg2, as a commentator. Che bello!
Exit poll for Tg2: Senato PD 36.5- 42.5 versus PDL 39 - 46.
Sinistra Arcobaleno collapses (5); IdV does well (3-4%), but better in the Camera. Destra also does well, polling […]

Turnout down from 2006: cui bono?

Repubblica.it reports that turnout at 19.00 is down 3.5 points from 2006, from 52.2% to 48.7%. If turnout is lower than it was two years ago, who benefits?
The ‘common wisdom‘ in political science is that higher turnout benefits centre-left parties. But Italy may defy the common wisdom - two years ago, Berlusconi presaged that he […]