The role orientation of political representatives and candidates is a longstanding concern in studies of democratic representation. The growing trend in countries to allow citizens abroad to candidate in homeland elections from afar provides an interesting opportunity for understanding how international mobility and context influences ideas of representation among these emigrant candidates. In public debates, emigrant candidates are often portrayed as delegates of the emigrant constituencies. However, drawing on the paradigmatic case of Italy and an original data set comprising emigrant candidates, we show that the perceptions of styles of representation abroad are more complex. Systemic differences between electoral districts at home and abroad are relevant for explaining why and how candidates develop a trustee or delegate orientation.
The 2014 European elections were characterized in many countries by growing support for Eurosceptic parties. This growth was not uniform and not clearly associated with the economic performance of these member states. In this article, we investigate the role played in the 2014 European Parliament elections by a country-specific factor – the composition of government coalitions – different from economic performance. In particular, we argue that in those countries where moderately Eurosceptic parties were more involved in the government, citizens with negative attitudes toward the European Union were more likely to vote for highly Eurosceptic parties. This was especially the case when the governments also included strongly pro-EU parties. The empirical analysis, which is based upon the 2014 European Election Voter Study, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, and the Parliaments and Governments database, confirms our hypotheses.
There is emerging understanding in the literature that voters who have a migration background across Western countries tend to vote for left leaning parties. Yet little is known about whether this implies different drivers of vote choice for citizens with migration background in comparison to natives. This article intends to respond to this question by studying the impact of specific policy issue considerations on the vote of citizens with both migration and non-migration background. To do so, we focus on the 2015 and 2019 Swiss National elections, relying on data
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.