The second “Mario Caciagli” Prize for the best article published in the Italian Journal of Electoral Studies – Quaderni dell’Osservatorio Elettorale (QOE-IJES) in 2024-2025 has been awarded to Giuseppe Carteny, Daniela Braun, Alexander Hartland (Saarland University) and Ann-Kathrin Reinl (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim). The winning paper, "Party competition on European issues in the 2024 EP elections," was published in issue 1/2025 of the journal.

The award ceremony took place on Friday, 6 November, at the Italian Chamber of Deputies, during the conference “La partecipazione al voto in Italia tra diritto e dovere”. The conference was promoted by SISE, ITANES, CISE, POPE@SISP, QOE-IJES, the Master in "Scienze elettorali e del governo" at Sapienza University of Rome, and LaPolis.

The article examines party competition on European issues in the 2024 European Parliament elections, compared with 2019. Using transformer-based language models applied to party manifestos from nine countries, it finds a higher salience of European issues and differentiated polarisation between mainstream and Eurosceptic parties.