Italy in times of protest and negative voting: An introduction

The classic heuristics of voting behaviour have been eroded overtime especially in well-established democracies. Ideology, party identification, and social class have been gradually replaced by short-period factors. In particular, the personalization has represented an innovative variable that significantly contributes to explain voting behaviour. Cross-pressures between party identification, candidate assessments and issue preferences paved the way to the diffusion of protest voting, both against the élite and the system. In this respect, Italy represents a very interesting case from both a theoretical and an empirical point view considering the presence of protest parties and the important diffusion of anti-system movements which surfed the protest to consolidate their positions. The editors conceived this special issue aiming at analysing and measuring the impact of protest/negative voting in Italy between 2016 and 2020, a period in which protest parties and voters’ discontent have significantly increased. Data presented by the different papers confirm, albeit under different perspectives, the relevance of this peculiar form of political behaviour.

Where has the protest gone? Populist attitudes and electoral flows in Italian political turmoil

What happens when anti-establishment political actors gain strength, enter institutions, and even become the new establishment? To what extent are their electoral profiles and the demands behind them normalised by the system? This article uses ITANES surveys to investigate voters’ reactions to the different paths taken by the three main protagonists of the 2016-2020 Italian populist wave: the M5S, the Lega, and FDI. In particular, it uses panel data to study the evolution of populist attitudes and protest drivers, as well as their connection with electoral flows and parties’ strategic choices. The most striking change concerns the redefinition of the political outlook of 5-star voters, who have significantly reduced their populist stances. However, the transformation of the M5S into a government party produced significant outflows of voters who already in 2016 expressed greater resentment towards political elites. These dynamics have largely favoured parties of the populist right – the Lega and then especially FDI – which have preserved or even reinforced their (electoral) profile as anti-establishment parties.

Think Different? Populist Attitudes, Their Antecedents and Consequences on Vote Behaviour and Outcome Evaluation in the 2016 And 2020 Italian Constitutional Referenda

Following the rise of populist parties and leaders in the last decade, research has extensively investigated the political and economic factors that have driven some voters towards populism. Less research has been devoted to the individual psychological factors associated with populist attitudes, and to how those can influence political decisions, such as vote choice in an election or referendum. In this study, we analysed data from the 2016 and 2020 ITANES panel surveys, where populist attitudes were measured by a 6-item scale. Findings indicate that populist attitudes were associated with relevant psychosocial factors, such as nationalism, political efficacy, and conspiracist beliefs. Populist attitudes in turn explained part of the variance in vote choice at both referenda, after controlling for reform evaluation and political orientation. Furthermore we found that voters with strong populist attitudes had a tendency to engage in motivated reasoning in the form of the biased evaluation of the foreseeability of the referendum results, making simplified and self-reassuring evaluations aligned with their vote choice. The discussion focuses on how populism as a political phenomenon can be rooted in relevant individual differences in the psychological features of voters.

Protest against the politicians

Referenda provide the opportunity for voters to express political economic protest and provide additional ways to support parties they vote for in elections. Alternatively, referenda also provide voters a chance to express their policy references in a way that does not affect which party will lead the government. The rejection of the 2016 Italian Constitutional referendum by 60% of voters and the approval the 2020 Italian Constitutional Referendum by 70% of voters could be a result of changing political economic conditions, underlying partisanship, or a change in approval of the reforms contained within the referendum. The article examines these possibilities in turn and then in a multivariate analysis. First, the overall change in economic discontent, satisfaction with the governing coalition, and belief in the content of the reforms between 2016 and 2020 will be examined. We also examine the how voters of each of the parties in the 2018 general election shifted on these variables. Then individual level analysis of consistent voters and switchers will assess the relative strength of partisanship, economic, political, and referendum-specific factors in convincing voters to switch their vote., we find that referendum-specific factors had the strongest predictive power. voters approved of the contents that would reduce the number of politicians in Italy. Our results contribute to the studies on second-order elections where voters are allowed for greater expressive preferences.

Il disallineamento tra orientamenti elettorali e posizioni sui temi: una questione giovanile o di famiglia politica?

The transformation of politics in contemporary democracies has led to the emergence of a new ideological conflict, alongside the traditional left-right scheme, described as liberal–authoritarian or cosmopolitan–nationalist cleavage (Norris and Inglehart 2018; Kriesi 2008; 2012; Hooge and Marks 2009; 2018). This brought to a redefinition of the linkages between issue and voting preferences, as many voters decide to support a party independently of their positions or change positions on the issues while voting for the same party. Within such framework, the contribute of the new generations to the growth of the electoral dealignment and volatility has been largely analysed (Franklin 2004; Miller and Shanks 1996; Plutzer 2006). Issue incongruency is part of the process. Young people are often considered to be tolerant and inclusive because they grew up under prosperous and secure conditions and developed post-materialist values of freedom, multiculturalism, progressivism (Inglehart and Welzel 2005; Janmaat and Keating 2019). However, the perspective of left-cosmopolitans engaged in electoral politics contrasts with the image of economically-insecure left-behind group of young people who don’t share the same progressive values (Sloam and Henn 2017; Sanders and Twyman 2016) and support right-wing political parties. What is still unknown is the extent to which extreme ideological traits and attitudes (e.g. negative discourses on immigration) combine with positions of openness on individual freedom. Likewise, the same contradiction can be found among left-wing voters who assume liberal position on economy or those economically left and culturally conservative. The article aims at analysing the relationship between issue positions and vote (propensity to vote). We test the hypotheses of a coherent vs incoherent ideological space by looking at the structure of voters’ preferences on economic (State vs. free market) and cultural issues (individual rights, attitudes towards minorities, European integration) and the differences between young people and older component of the electorate. The analysis is focused on the Italian case. Data are taken from the 2020 Itanes survey.

Losers get sick? The effects of electoral defeat on perceptions of pandemic risk

Research in political behavior shows that citizens update their past perceptions and future expectations over several phenomena depending on whether their favorite party wins or loses the elections. This bias is explained by different psychological mechanisms triggered by individuals' attachment and trust in political parties. In this paper we investigate whether such a winner-loser effect conditions people's concerns about the Covid-19 pandemic. We leverage the occurrence of regional elections in six Italian regions in September 2020, right at the onset of the second wave of the pandemic in the country, to test whether supporting a candidate who won/lost the elections affects (1) people's fear to get sick with Covid-19, and (2) their expectation about the gravity of the upcoming second wave. Given that the public healthcare system in Italy is managed by the regions, we expect supporters of the losing candidate to lose trust in the region's ability to deal with the pandemic, hence increasing their personal concerns. We test this expectation using pre/post election panel data, and employing respondents from the other regions who voted at a concurrent referendum as a placebo group. Our results show that, while overall concerns tend to decrease from the first to the second wave, for elections losers they remain unchanged. This indicates that losing an election, albeit second-order, can affect citizens' outlook on future events in domains that are largely beyond political control.

Looking through the mirror: representativeness of the Italian party system before the 2018 General Election

The use of the Internet and communication technologies has dramatically increased in recent times. This change has affected every aspect of political life, with electoral campaigns and parties making no exception. One of the most significant advancements on the theme is the spread of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs). These tools are developed before elections to match users’ policy preferences to those of the parties running. By looking at the dataset created with the answers of the users of an Italian VAA, Navigatore Elettorale, this study aims at understanding the representativeness of the six main parties running in the 2018 General Election. Through the development of a Representative Deficit Index, the study will also assess the key policy areas in which each of these parties performed best in the eyes of the electorate. The finding shows a diversified pattern of (in)successes for each of the parties, with some unexpected results.

Zooming in on the ‘Europeanisation’ of national politics: A comparative analysis of six EU countries

This article empirically revisits and tests the effect of individual distance from parties on the EU integration dimension and on the left–right dimension for vote choice in both national and European elections. This analysis is based on the unique European Election Study (EES) 2014 survey panel data from seven EU countries. Our findings show that in most countries the effect of individual distance on the EU integration dimension is positive and significant for both European and national elections. Yet the effect of this dimension is not uniform across all seven countries, revealing two scenarios: one in which it is only relevant for Eurosceptic voters and the other in which it is significant for voters of most parties in the system. The first is mainly related to the presence of a ‘hard’ Eurosceptic party in the party supply, but the second, which indicates a more advanced level of Europeanisation of party systems, is not explained by most current theoretical and empirical contributions. We conclude by proposing two additional explanations for this latter scenario in which the EU integration dimension is present for most voters in both type of elections, including those voting for the main parties. Our findings and further discussion have implications for the understanding of the Europeanisation of national politics and its relationship with vote choice.

The fragile blue wall: analyzing geographies of the 2020 US presidential election

US presidential elections are peculiar contests based on mediation by an Electoral College in which votes are aggregated on a state-by-state basis. In 2020, as in 2016, the outcome was decided by a set of states where the two candidates were equally competitive: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Two geographical stories tend to dominate accounts of what happened in 2020. The first story is based on red (Republican) versus blue (Democratic) states, and the second story relies upon rural versus urban biases in support for the two parties. After showing how and where Donald Trump outperformed the expectations of pre-election polls, we consider these two geographical stories both generally, and more specifically, in relation to the crucial swing states. Through an examination of the successes of Joe Biden in Arizona and Georgia, two states long thought of as “red”, and the role of the suburbs and local particularities in producing this result, we conclude that the polarization of the United States into two hostile electorates is exaggerated.

Issue characterization of electoral change (and how recent elections in Western Europe were won on economic issues)

Results of the last electoral season in Western Europe have been mostly seen in the light of the success of challenger, anti-establishment parties. According to this narrative, past elections have been overwhelmingly dominated by cultural issues such as immigration and the EU. However, these accounts suffer from several limitations. First, they generally focus on the determinants of the static component of electoral results (i.e. vote choice) rather than the factors leading to vote change (i.e. the individual-level component of aggregate electoral change). Second, relying on party manifestos and programmatic platforms, they usually offer a party-based reconstruction of the general climate of elections. As a consequence, they provide only an indirect, at best limited, overview of the actual political issues that might have driven electoral results. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we introduce a new methodological strategy to characterize electoral results in comparative perspective. To do so we leverage an issue-rich public opinion dataset to estimate individual-level vote change towards each party as a function of issue-based party-voter affinity measures in 6 European countries. Relying on 38 logistic regression models (one for each party), our results contradict many current interpretations of electoral results in Western Europe, in fact showing that economic issues, rather than broad cultural ones, emerged as the most relevant predictors of vote inflows. Furthermore, it also demonstrates the relevance of “cross-ideological” mobilization across all the 6 countries covered in this study.