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ABSTRACT
The article complements our collection of studies of politics in polarised Southern Europe by offering a cross-regional comparison. Following a brief excursion into how polarisation in Southern Europe has been addressed in the existing literature, the focus zooms in on three country case studies. After showing the differential evolution of polarisation in Italy, Greece and Spain over recent decades, the story is brought up to date with an examination of the specific ways in which polarisation played out in the 2019 election cycle. marked by the Catalan conflict in Spain, the Macedonian name question in Greece and the polarising role of Matteo Salvini in Italy. The article concludes with comparative insights into the current polarisation drives in the three countries.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Anna Bosco and Susannah Verney are the Editors of South European Society and Politics and the related Routledge book series. Together they have co-edited four comparative books, all published by Routledge, most recently Crisis Elections, New Contenders and Government Formation: Breaking the Mould in Southern Europe (2018).
Notes
1. According to Gerring, descriptive arguments describe a phenomenon by answering ‘what’ questions – when, whom, how possible, in what manner – while causal arguments answer ‘why’ questions. ‘Where knowledge of a topic is minimal, description must proceed independently of causal propositions’ (Citation2012, p. 733).
2. On the relevance of anti-system parties as indicators of polarisation, see Sartori (Citation2005, pp. 307–308, Citation1982, p. 221).
3. A polarisation index was thus defined as ‘the distance between any two groups of partisans, as measured by the (absolute) difference between their mean self-locations divided by the theoretical maximum, which, on the left-right scale in question, is 9’ (Sani & Sartori Citation1983, p. 321).
4. The parties were, in Italy, the PCI (Italian Communist Party) on the left and the MSI (Italian Social Movement); in Spain, the PCE (Spanish Communist Party) and the rightwing Alianza Popular; in Greece, the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) on the left and a succession of far right parties, the National Camp (Εθνική Παράταξη) represented in the national parliament (1977–1981), the Progressive Party (Κόμμα Προοδευτικών) and EPEN (Εθνική Πολιτική Ένωση – National Political Union), with one European Parliament seat each in 1981–84 and 1984–1989 respectively.
5. On the democratic adaptation of anti-system parties in the democracies of Southern Europe, see Bosco (Citation2001).
6. According to the literature on affective polarisation, which is based on the Social Identity Theory by Henri Tajfel, partisanship has become an indicator of social identity: ‘parties are salient social identities and … citizens derive self-esteem and satisfaction from the relative success and status of their party compared to that of the other’. As a consequence, not only voters will focus on news and opinions that favour their party, but ‘the combination of these strong identities and formation of biased beliefs is hypothesised to generate affective polarization between the parties’ (McCarty Citation2019, p. 62).
7. The Affective Polarisation Index elaborated by Reiljan (Citation2020, p. 380) ‘indicates the average of partisan affective evaluations between in-party and out-parties, weighted by the electoral size (vote share) of the parties’. For a discussion on the measures of affective polarisation, see also Druckman and Levendusky (Citation2019).
8. Reiljan relies on data from the third and fourth waves of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, and therefore takes into account Portugal in 2009 and 2015, Spain in 2008 and Greece in 2009 and 2012.
9. The authors take into account Greece in 2009, 2012 and 2015; Portugal in 2002, 2005, 2009 and 2015; and Spain in 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008 (Gidron, Adams & Horne Citation2020, p. 19).
10. In the 46 years between 1948 and 1994, the DC ruled in coalition with minor centre-left and centre-right parties and only four prime ministers (out of 30) were not Christian Democrats.
11. Further evidence that mass polarisation was driven by Berlusconi can be found by looking at the justice cleavage. In the period 1994–2011 diverging trends of trust in the judiciary according to citizens’ political orientation showed that ‘Berlusconi’s anti-judicial rhetoric .. had a significant impact on public attitudes towards the judiciary, and contributed to exacerbating the polarisation between two opposite views of the justice system in Italy’ (Dallara Citation2015, p. 60).
12. Mavrogordatos (Citation1984), in an influential article, was the first to apply the polarised pluralism model to Greece, but for the post-1981 period.
13. In Spanish, the term means dramatic confrontation, the application of force, extreme conflict. Given the absence of a precise equivalent in English, the Spanish term is used here.
14. The PP, which in 2004 expected the vote to confirm its hold on office, stigmatised the PSOE victory as an ‘accident’ brought about by the terrorist attacks that had taken place in three Madrid railway stations on the early morning of 11 March (M-11), only a few days before the elections of 14 March.
15. Although Rajoy attacked almost every decision of the Zapatero governments, his prime targets were not the more ideologically-driven measures – on which the PP would have gained a hearing only among its own supporters – but ‘state issues’, such as counter-terrorism strategies, the territorial organisation of the state and, after 2008, the management of the economic crisis. In other words, the PP chose to politicise transversal issues that were more likely to attract to the party the support of progressively-minded voters while toning down its profile, seen as too conservative by most Spanish voters (Bosco Citation2018; Gunther & Montero Citation2012).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Anna Bosco
Anna Bosco is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics and Politics of the European Union at the University of Florence. She has carried out research on parties and party systems change in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and East-Central Europe.
Susannah Verney
Susannah Verney is is Associate Professor of European Integration and European Politics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has carried out research on Greek and South European politics, euroscepticism and EU Enlargement.