Voters’ preferences and electoral systems: the EuroVotePlus experiment in Italy

Abstract

Motivated by the need to understand voting behaviour under different electoral rules, Laslier et al. (Eur Union Polit, 16(4):601–615, 2015) have conducted an online experiment, the EuroVotePlus experiment, focusing on the effects of the different rules adopted to elect members of the European parliament on voters’ behaviour. The experiment took place in several European countries in the 3 weeks before the 2014 elections for the European Parliament. This paper focuses on the Italian data. Firstly, we show that the behaviour of Italian respondents is consistent with the empirical findings at the European level. Then, we exploit the change from open list to closed list elections implemented in Italy in 1993 to investigate whether and how preferences over institutions are affected by experience. We find that respondents who voted using the open list system in Italy are more likely to prefer closed list systems, and that the effect is stronger the higher the number of open list elections the respondents have faced.