Leonardo Carella
@leonardocarella
Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer, University of Vienna, Department of Government. Former minor twitter celebrity/hate figure.
If Hamish's father's record on the same brief is any indication, I'm not holding my breath for a serious conversation on PR just yet.
Moreover, the abolition of single-member districts eases Vannacci’s integration in the Right’s fold. At the last election in 2022, Lega won over a third of the Right’s districts (and over a quarter of all districts, because the Right won almost all of them). But now it's a much smaller party. (12)
A second spur for the reform, in my view, is the rise of an opposition party to the right of the current government (already dominated by radical right parties): Futuro Nazionale, led by Roberto Vannacci (a former Lega MEP and Army general), now polling at 6%, on par with Lega and Forza Italia. (9)
Requiring coalitions to agree on a PM candidate, the reform also throws a spanner in the electoral pact negotiations between PD and M5S, which will have to agree on a PM before – and not after – the election. This may sow discord, or favour a coalition PM candidate unpopular with the voters. (8)
So, from Meloni’s point of view, the reform creates an opportunity for a large majority in parliament with a slim plurality of votes (even at the risk of a Left majority, though see below), against the prospect of a hung parliament under the current rules. (See seat projections below.) (7)
The electoral reform is a list-PR system with a majority bonus of 17.5% (70 seats in the Lower House, 35 in the Senate) for the largest coalition, provided it gets over 42% of the vote. Coalitions will also be required to indicate explicitly the Prime Minister they will propose. (2)
🗳️ Electoral Reform Alert 🗳️ Yesterday, the Italian Lower House approved a new electoral reform, now headed to the Senate. This would be the fifth major reform of the electoral system in Italy since 1993, and it could bring an even more radical right-wing party into the next government coalition. (1)
American soft power latest: Today’s front page or an Italian right-wing tabloid reads “Trump is a dickhead”
It's really important that democratic elites start to get that a significant part of the malaise and discomfort with multi-cultural Britain is manufactured by hostile actors on social media, and that they don't play into it as if it's a real fact of life. www.ft.com/content/dd79...
AI text detectors were always lousy, but they've already enshittified: some will detect AI in human-generated text so they can sell you an AI service to "fix all issues" or "humanize" your text.
I got curious about this, after the replies to my post (bsky.app/profile/leon...), so I reverse-engineered these figures from YouGov polls (Jan25-May26) that use quotas by 2016 vote. In short: the Tories are still a plurality-Leave party - by a 50/35 split, which checks out with the BES figure.
There are now more Tory supporters who *say* they voted Remain than Leave. In the BES, which has EU vote information from previous waves rather than recalled vote, the split is 50-35 for Leave (vote intention is 2025 though). If anything, false recall is even more damning for the Brexit project.
I'm partial to a Sankey diagram too, it's the model I have a problem with. Fwiw, this individual-level analysis is with 2025 data, but probably closer to what's actually going on in 2026 as well...
The AfD could win an overall majority of seats in the September state election in Sachsen-Anhalt. Die Zeit puts their chances at 37%, with current polling. www.zeit.de/politik/2026...
I'm not very well-versed in this but Curtice and Marsh (2014) found evidence of ‘under-use’ of preferences + alphabetic voting. I looked at voter error a few months ago for a thing, and found persistent increases in invalid voting (though not huge) since 2007. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
I have the proceedings on Dropbox, because I'm sad like that.
If you just split MPs 325/325 and then have the PR upper tier's district coincide with the Government Office Region, you basically end up with Germany, but without compensation mandates, which I think is fine.
Manchester's map looks a bit like Berlin's and Vienna's - green core with social democratic red ring around it, radical right in the poor suburbs, traditional right in the rich ones..
For a project (now defunct, turned into something else entirely), I gathered data from Italian public opinion polls from the 1950s and 1970s. The gender gap in DC support is CRAZY.
Yup. Cultural conflicts eat up the categories of "old" politics and spit them out as something completely different. @fraraffaelli.bsky.social and I have a paper about this 👇
Farage has assessed - perhaps correctly - that nativism and NIMBYism are the ideological core of the British right. The strategy that logically follows - "concentration camps, but not where you live" - would be comical if it didn't entail concentration camps.