Coordinated by the Italian Center for Electoral Research (Centro Italiano Study Elettorali or CISE), this project focuses on the analysis of voting behaviour, party strategies, and electoral outcomes covering elections in six key European countries, that took place in 2017 and 2018: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and United Kingdom.

The project aims to answer three main research questions: (1) at the level of citizens, are we facing an “end of ideology”? (2) what type of strategies do political parties adopt in this new environment? Do parties emphasize mainly conflict mobilization strategies, typical of positional issues, or do they rather stress their problem-solving capacity, which is more commonly associated with valence issues? (3) How successful are these party strategies? The analysis of party competition and voting choices in these six countries relies on a newly collected comparative dataset, which include, for each of the six elections, a pre- and post- election CAWI public opinion component and a party communication component based on the manual coding of Twitter messages produced by parties and leaders. The outcome of this comparative project will appear as a special issue on West European Politics early 2019.