Democratizing Parties in France and Italy: A Comparative Study on Voters in Primary Elections

Following a general trend, the French Socialist Party (PS) and the Italian Democratic Party (PD) have recently organized primary elections. PS in October 2011 has nominated its candidate for the 2012 presidential election through a two-round coalition primary; PD in October 2009 has chosen its leader through a party primary included in a multi-stage selection procedure. This paper focuses on those events with particular reference to the characteristics of the voters composing the “selectorate” of the two elections. We exploit survey data gathered through two exit polls where a standardized questionnaire has been used, so that French and Italian voters have been interviewed posing them very similar questions. By so doing, we may break in the individual level of analysis often overlooked in this kind of research. The paper is organized as follows. First, we describe at large the two primary elections in order to make clear the strengths and weaknesses of the comparison strategy, and we also discuss the limits of the data we make use of. Second, we compare the two selectorates’ sociographic (structural) characteristics, focusing on their gender composition, age groups distribution, and employment status. Third, we deepen the comparison of the two selectorates recurring to political variables, such as common sources of information, level of interest in politics, experiences in previous primaries, left-right self location, party perceptions, cues to select the candidate, and eventual availability of the disgruntled voters to support a second-best in the general election. Fourth, we finally contrast our results with some theoretical tenets about voting in primary elections in order to control their plausibility and to eventually find out new topics for future researches.