Italy went to the polls on 4 March 2018 in a general election whose outcome was highly uncertain until the very last day of the campaign. The three main contenders were the centre-right coalition led by Berlusconi and Salvini, the centre-left coalition headed by Renzi, and the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement)-a populist, anti-establishment party founded by comedian Beppe Grillo and now led by Luigi Di Maio. Uncertainty surrounded the election outcome not only due to the employment of a new, untested electoral system, but also as a result of the very high percentage of undecided voters and the competitiveness of the main political groupings. According to the polls, none of them would get the majority of seats in Parliament required to form a government outright.

The 2018 Italian election featured striking results, with both a historic success for the two challenger parties (League and M5S) and massive defeats for the two mainstream parties (PD and FI). In this article, we analyse party campaign strategies, and their consistency with the opportunity structures provided by the configuration of Italian public opinion. Relying on issue yield theory, we collected original survey data for both issue support and priority among Italian voters, and party emphases on issues in the electoral campaign -through Twitter data. Our findings indicate a generalised ideological inconsistency of the constituencies of main parties, while campaign strategies appear much more ideologically consistent. Moreover, we find that parties focussed mostly on conflict-mobilisation strategies, rather than on problem-solving. Finally, we show that, in general, parties acted strategically, by aligning their campaign to the available opportunities, although with relevant variations across parties.

The ability of parties to not only reflect, but actually shape, citizens' preferences on policy issues has been long debated, as it corresponds to a fundamental prediction of classic party identification theory. While most research draws on data from the United States and/or studies of low salience issues, we exploit the unique opportunity presented by the 2013 Italian election, with the four major parties of a clear multiparty setting holding distinct positions on crucial issues of the campaign. Based on an experimental design, we test the impact of party cues on citizens' preferences on high salience issues.

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Are European Parliament (EP) elections still second-order? In this article, we test the classical model at the individual level in contrast to an alternative ‘Europe matters’ model, by investigating the relative importance of domestic vs. European Union (EU)-related issues among voter-level determinants of aggregate second-order effects, that is, individual party change. We do so by relying on an original, CAWI pre-electoral survey featuring a distinctively large (30) number of both domestic and EU-related, positional and valence issues, with issue attitudes measured according to the innovative ICCP scheme (De Sio and Lachat 2020) which includes issue positions, issue priorities and respondents' assessment of party credibility on both positional and valence goals. Leveraging the concept of ‘normal vote’, we estimate multivariate models of electoral defections from normal voting separately for general and European elections, based on issue party credibility. This allows us to assess: (a) the distinctiveness of the two electoral arenas in terms of issue content; and (b) the relative impact of EU-related and domestic issues on defections of Italian voters. Our findings show that although second-order effects are still relevant in accounting for results in EP elections, vote choice in the latter is also partly due to specific effects of certain policy issues, including some related to the European dimension. This indicates that EP elections have their own political content, for which Europe matters even after controlling for the importance that EU-related issues have acquired in national elections.