As with last time round, I’m weighting the lowess trend line seen here by the number of respondents in the sample. Unfortunately, one of the polling companies, TermometroPolitico, is using an internet panel; because of the differences in make-up of internet panels compared to phone panels (and neither is perfect), certain cases tend to be weighted more heavily, which means the standard error might still be high even if the number of respondents is large.

At the moment, termometropolitico seems to be weighting on past vote recall and demographics; most phone interviewers just weight on demographics. My only concern about this is that respondents will falsely remember that they voted for the ‘winners’  in 2008, which might depress the centre-right’s vote share. Indeed, Termometropolitico’s estimates for the PdL tend to be on the low side.

That was fun.

This year, I’m aggregating the polling data for the European Parliament election — the Italian part, anyway.

This is less fun.

As everyone knows, European Parliament elections are second-order elections. Voters use them not to vote on the issues — they don’t know about the issues — but instead to give the government a progress report.

And whilst progress reports are interesting, your view of government performance might not be rocked that much by campaign events. And that’s when there is a campaign — so far, the parties have promised to spend less “in light of the current economic climate”.

With that out of the way, I present you with some flat lines:

The main lesson? No big transfer of votes from the Sinistra Arcobaleno to the Lega Nord.

The reason I’m blogging about it is that I already have a working paper on vote transfers, 2006-2008 which, I think, is technically and substantively superior to the Istituto Cattaneo, but I didn’t get two pages in Repubblica’s magazine. I’m sure there’s an Italian expression for sour grapes, but at the moment it escapes me.

[Okay, fare come la volpavolpe con l'uva, but it doesn't have quite the same ring to it].

Intriguingly, support for Alemanno went up even though turnout went down. Rutelli supporters were initially buoyed by lower turnout, viewing Alemanno as incapable of recouping sufficient additional votes. In the end, it seems that support for Rutelli in the first round was a mile wide and an inch deep.

The loss has put pressure on PD leader Walter Veltroni. The following graphic [hat-tip to costanza] is perhaps a little bit hard to explain, but at least Romans haven’t lost their sense of humour:

With the primaries you made the Prodi government fall
In the general election you chased the communists out of Parliament
Putting forward Rutelli you lost Rome
Walter – Sainthood Now!

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 set to full saturation, and provinces with the lowest share, zero saturation. In other words, don’t try and compare between the maps. Full PDF available here.

Using data from exit polls and two different methods of ecological inference, I demonstrate how Italian voters shifted between 2006 and 2008. In brief, newly formed parties (PdL, PD) were successful in retaining former voters; parties which looked as if they would be penalized by the electoral system (Sinistra Arcobaleno, UDC) were deserted by voters. The relative success of the Lega Nord and Italia dei Valori results from strong performance in retaining their own voters and marginal transfers of votes from their coalition partners

• 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 they did nationally, in order: Sicilia, Campania, Basilicata, Abruzzi
• regions the PDL+LN did relatively well in, in order: Calabria, Sicilia, Campania;
• regions the PDL+LN did relatively poorly in, in order: Molise, Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, Umbria

So, the centre-left got stronger where it was strongly already, and had problems in the South; the PDL + LN did well in the South, in particular picking up voters in Campania, presumably due to the government’s highly visibly problems dealing with rubbish piling up on Neapolitan streets.

As a result of this, the PDL + LN won ‘extra’ seats (seats in addition to those they would have done had there been a uniform national swing) in Lombardia (+4), Campania (+1), and the Veneto (+1).

1. “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 same across all the country, from north to south“.
2. The bullet-like prose of Ilvo Diamanti: “of every 10 elecftors of the radical left, less than three remained faithful, 2 voted for the PD+IdV, following the call of the “useful vote”. Half of them, instead, divided equally between abstention and other political formations. Fewfor the extreme left; most for the right. For the PdL, in the Mezzogiorno. For the Lega, in many zones of the North“.

So, there’s an effect there, but we don’t know how big it is. Diamanti’s data comes from Ipsos, who in turn used an ecological regression, presumably on heavily disaggregated data – so in principle the findings can be replicated.

If there was no movement over the last two weeks – a huge assumption – then we can see that, contrary to last time round, pollsters did not underestimate support for the main party of the centre-right, the PdL. Rather, they overestimated PDL support, but had problems  in estimating the success of the Lega.

Intriguingly, the Lega was under-estimated by about as much as the Sinistra Arcobaleno was over-rated. The Lega Nord now claims to be the working class party (partito operaio) of the North. Certainly, it would be interesting to find out how many former Communist voters, losing traditional voting cues with the disappearance of an overtly Communist party, switched their vote to the Lega at the last moment, but this is based on pure speculation.