California and Washington recently replaced traditional partisan elections with nonpartisan “top-two” election procedures. Some reform advocates hoped that voters would behave in a way to support moderate candidates in the primary stage; the limited evidence for this behaviour has led some scholars to conclude that the reform has little chance to change meaningful policy outcomes. Yet we find that the nonpartisan procedure has predictable and disparate political consequences: the general elections between two candidates of the same party, called copartisan general elections, tend to occur in districts without any meaningful crossparty competition. Furthermore, copartisan elections are more likely to occur with open seats, when a new legislator will begin building a network of relationships. The results, viewed through the lens of the Advocacy Coalition Framework, suggest that opportunities exist for coalitional rearrangement over time.

This article analyses the differences in voting behaviour of the selectorate and electorate of the Italian Partito Democratico (PD) in 2013, particularly focussing on the role played by leadership, ideology, and media in affecting voting decisions. We study the different motivations underlying the decision to vote for the PD in the 2013 Italian general election or for each one of the three candidates to party leadership in the 2013 PD leadership selection race. The empirical analysis uses 2013 Italian National Election Study and 2013 Candidate & Leader Selection data. Results of the analysis show that leadership evaluation has a stronger influence on the selectorate than on the electorate and that the perceived distance between voters and the party on the left-right continuum has a stronger impact on the electorate than on the selectorate. Moreover, the analysis underlines that media are substantially not a relevant factor explaining voting behaviour of PD’s electorate and selectorate. These findings confirm the relevancy of leadership evaluation in intra-party competitions and open a new perspective to study leader selection races.