Remaking Italy? Place Configurations and Italian Electoral Politics under the ‘Second Republic’

Abstract

The Italian Second Republic was meant to have led to a bipolar polity with alternation in national government between conservative and progressive blocs. Such a system it has been claimed would undermine the geographical structure of electoral politics that contributed to party system immobilism in the past. However, in this article I argue that dynamic place configurations are central to how the ‘new’ Italian politics is being constructed. The dominant emphasis on either television or the emergence of ‘politics without territory’ has obscured the importance of this geographical restructuring. New dynamic place configurations are apparent particularly in the South which has emerged as a zone of competition between the main party coalitions and a nationally more fragmented geographical pattern of electoral outcomes. These patterns in turn reflect differential trends in support for party positions on governmental centralization and devolution, geographical patterns of local economic development, and the re-emergence of the North–South divide as a focus for ideological and policy differences between parties and social groups across Italy.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented as a keynote lecture at the Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy at the Italian Cultural Centre, London, November 2004. Thanks to Simon Parker for inviting me and to Simon Parker, Gianfranco Pasquino, Mark Donovan, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. They are not responsible for what I have made of them.

Notes

Notes

[1]  See also Gianfranco Pasquino's article in this issue on the coalition and party building skills of Berlusconi.

[2]  Notwithstanding much talk about mergers between DS and Margherita on the centre-left and Forza Italia and Alleanza Nazionale on the centre-right not much has actually come of this yet except for the decision to run candidates of the former two in Chamber contests in 2006 under the sign of L’Ulivo, formerly the name of the centre-left coalition as a whole.

[3]  Although there was a strong correlation between votes in the SMDs and the PR contests, in that there was not a large ‘leakage’ of votes between one coalition in the former and affiliated parties of the other in the latter, the centre-left tended to perform better than its constituent parties and vice versa for the Polo. In 2001 only 400,000 votes separated the coalitions nationally in the SMDs, while 3.3 million more voters preferred the Polo/Casa parties in the PR ballot (Parker & Natale 2002, p. 669). Much of this ‘gap’ was due either to more voting by centre-left voters for non-coalition parties in the PR part or to higher rates of abstention on their part in PR contests than shifting across coalitions between the two parts of the election. The ‘gap’ between the two parts provided much of the incentive for Berlusconi and his allies to change the electoral system in 2005 towards a more proportional system to blunt the centre-left's tendency to do better in majoritarian contests.

[4]  In his careful empirical analysis of the outcomes of Berlusconi's 2001 ‘Contract with the Italians,’ Ricolfi (2006) shows that the centre-right did not have much justification in campaigning in 2006 as if it had achieved much success in the areas of tax reform and public works during its five years of government. From this viewpoint, voting for the centre-right in 2006 could hardly be construed as validating retrospective voting along economic lines! Indeed, it could even be said that the contract itself was more leftwing, in its emphasis on pensions and job growth, than it was rightwing (in a neo-liberal sense), ignoring completely such matters as privatization of state assets, liberalization of labour markets, and reducing the government deficit (Cazzola 2005).