CEVIPOL - Centre d'étude de la vie politique

Members

Giulia SANDRI

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Career

C.V.

Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Depaertment of Politics and International Relations
University of Oxford (2012-2013)
Research Assistant and PhD student, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Department of Political Science (2007-2011).
Research Assistant, Catholic University of Louvain, Department of Political Science (2006-2007).
MA Université Libre de Bruxelles, Political Science, 2007.
MA Université Libre de Bruxelles, European Politics, 2005.
BA (Laurea) Turin University, International Relations, 2004.

Research presentation

Primary elections, Party membership (surveys), Intra-party democracy, Italian party system, Belgian party system, National and Sub-national elections (results, surveys and exit polls), Political parties (organization and leadership), Ethno-regionalist parties (organization and ideology), Federalism and regionalism in Western Europe.

In particular, my research activities are organized in the framework of the Post-doctoral research project financed by the Wiener-Anspach Foundation: "Explaining the consequences of primary elections in Europe".

Primary elections for choosing party leaders and candidates are becoming usual events for European parties. This project gives the independent variable, namely primaries, a much-needed conceptualization with regard to European contexts. The aim of the project is to describe the nature and functioning of primary elections (open and closed) in Europe and to provide a comparative analytical framework for clarifying the consequences of primaries on the internal and external functioning of political parties. This framework will be elaborated on the basis of the analytical tools developed for studying the American experience, which will be explored and adapted to the European declination of primary elections. The two research questions of the study, stemming from the main open debates in the North American literature, are the following: to what extent primaries affect negatively the electoral performance of parties within European contexts? To what extent primaries represent a factor hindering party's organizational strength and cohesion? The study takes as main unit of analysis individual parties and their organizational features. The project is articulated into two different steps. The first step deals with the identification of my case studies thought the establishment of a comparative dataset exploring the nature and type of primary elections adopted by parliamentary parties in the 27 EU Members States since the 1970s. In the second step of the study I develop an analytical framework for explaining the impact of primaries on political parties. The framework looks at both organizational aspects and electoral ones. Thus, four different dimensions will be analyzed: factionalism, leadership type and autonomy, candidate autonomy and electoral performance of the party. I use macro-statistical methods to determine the association between the features of primary elections and the indicators elaborated on the basis of US literature on the selected case studies. This research project is innovative from an empirical point of view, because it considers the issue of primary elections as a phenomenon as such and because it analyzes the phenomenon under a comparative perspective. At theoretical level, the study provides an original wide-ranging evaluation and systematization on the US literature on primary elections.

Publications

• Articles
• Contributions
• Conferences
• Non-academic publications