In December 2016, the Italian electorate voted for a referendum on crucial constitutional reform promoted by the governing party. The official aims of the reform were both to improve the country's governability and stability and to simplify the institutional setup. Despite not strictly being a...

Why do anti-immigrant political parties have more success in areas that host fewer immigrants? Using regression discontinuity design, structural breaks search methods and data from a sample of Italian municipalities, we show that the relationship between the vote shares of anti-immigrant parties...

Is it possible to forecast electoral results by analyzing social media conversations? This paper aims to contribute to the debate raised by authors claiming to have successfully predicted the outcomes of an election from Twitter or Facebook data. Our work tested the purported predictive power of...

Primary elections have become a relevant aspect of Italian politics, where participation of the whole citizenship, in disregard of party affiliation, is allowed. On one side, they can be considered a tool that political parties set up in order to react against the crisis of legitimacy they are...