Voters' Preferences and Electoral Systems : The EuroVotePlus Experiment in Italy

Motivated by the need of understanding voting behavior under different electoral rules, Laslier et al. (2015) have conducted an online experiment in several European countries during the three weeks before the 2014 elections for the European Parliament, the EuroVotePlus experiment. This paper focuses on the Italian data. We first show that the behavior 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 that the respondents have faced