Relationship between Turnout and Votes for PRO-EU Parties in Italy

Author: Stefano Chiesa

Is there a relationship between the turnout of the European Parliament elections in Italy and the percentage of votes received by pro-EU parties? In this project, I will analyze the data from the European Parliament elections in Italy to answer this question.

I performed the following steps:

• Load and inspect the data;
• Calculate the correlation between the turnout and the votes for pro-EU parties;
• Create a scatter plot to visualize the relationship between turnout and votes for pro-EU parties.

Data Sources:

• Europa Elections: https://results.elections.europa.eu/en/tools/download-datasheets/
• BiDiMedia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGWWdETT0Kk

Guide to the files

In the repository you can find the following files and directories:

• EUelectionsIT.ipynb: Jupyter Notebook presentation of the analyses;
• data/: containing all the Italian election data;
• data/all_data.xlsx: excel file with the information about the Italian parties' results per each year. You can find the csv version here;
• data/turnout.xlsx: excel file with the turnout data per each year. You can find the csv version here;
• requirements.txt: a text file containing the packages used in the code.

Methodology Note

The parties are classified through the binary column "PRO_EU", indicating whether the party is pro-EU (1) or not (0). This value is assigned based on my knowledge of Italian politics and internet research. When I wasn't sure about the classification, I assigned a value of NA. Someone might disagree with my classification, feel free to contact me if you have any suggestions.

Limits of the Analysis

The analysis has some limitations:

• The classification of parties as pro-EU or not is subjective and based on my knowledge of Italian politics and internet research. There might be disagreements about the classification of some parties;
• The data only includes the European Parliament elections in Italy, and the relationship between voter turnout and votes for pro-EU parties might differ in other elections or countries.

Don't hesitate to contact me if you have any suggestions or questions.