Leaders as cognitive shortcuts: on the representation of political competition at the European elections of 2014 in Italy

ABSTRACT

The huge success of the Democratic Party at the last European Parliament (EP) election in Italy has been widely interpreted as due to the unusual ability of its new leader Matteo Renzi to mobilize support for his party in an era of candidate-oriented and valence politics in which political leaders’ personal characteristics are crucial for vote choices and party performances. Framing the last EP elections as a sign of the overwhelming importance of personalized politics and personalized voting, however, does not tell us everything, there is to know about the role of leaders in voters’ decisions. According to the literature, in fact, leaders are not only a collection of personal traits and characteristics exerting short-term effects on voting behaviour, but also cognitive shortcuts that help decision-making by simplifying the complexity of the political environment. Within this framework, we investigate whether leader evaluations, in the form of confidence ratings, provide information about how Italian voters perceived the structure of political debate at the 2014 EP elections. Our results confirm that judgments of leaders imply specific representations of political competition, of which we try to outline some general features.

KEYWORDS:

• 2014 EP elections
• leaders
• political competition
• cognitive shortcuts
• leader evaluation
• majority/opposition scheme

Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank Luciano M. Fasano, Marco Giuliani, Paolo Segatti (University of Milano), Pierangelo Isernia (University of Siena) and James L. Newell (University of Salford) for their valuable feedback on the first draft of this essay. We also thank the three anonymous reviewers of Contemporary Italian Politics. Their comments and suggestions helped us significantly to improve our work. We continue to bear full responsibility for what is presented in the essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Figure 1 was constructed using survey data accessible through the Dipartimento per l’informazione e l’editoria – Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri website. We chose to present the findings of the surveys carried out by the Ixé Institute because they are the most extensive time series of Italian public opinion in relation to the period of interest. Moreover, they rely on a uniform sampling design and the same system of data collection.

2. In several analyses, for example, some applications of factor analysis have counter-intuitively suggested that ‘liberalism’ and ‘conservatism’ constitute two separate and independent factors, rather than a single bipolar factor (Conover and Feldman 1981; Krosnick and Weisberg 1988; Weisberg 1980).

3. For further analyses focusing on the Italian case using this approach, see for example: Baldassarri and Schadee (2004); Baldassarri (2005); De Sio and Schadee (2013).

4. The survey was carried out by the Tecnè Institute in April 2014. The sample size was 1,000 and interviews were conducted using Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI).

5. Confidence in leaders has been derived from responses to the following question: ‘I am going to read out the names of some Italian political leaders. How much do you trust each of them: A great deal, quite a lot, a little or not at all?’ Unfortunately, due to data limitations, the number of leaders included, as well as the number of response categories, is quite limited. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether research using more or better indicators would allow us to come to the same conclusions.

6. For a general overview of ALSCAL and the family of techniques to which it belongs (multidimensional scaling), see for example: Schiffman, Reynolds, and Young (1981); cf Coxon (1982); Cox and Cox (1994). For a substantive application of ALSCAL to Italian public-opinion data, see instead: Schadee, Segatti, and Vezzoni (2011).

7. In order to assess the reasoning algorithm described above, we recoded the original Likert scales measuring confidence in leaders deriving a new dichotomous variable contrasting those respondents who expressed a great deal or quite a lot of trust in Renzi and Alfano with those who expressed little or no confidence in Berlusconi and Grillo, and vice versa.

8. To appreciate the magnitude of the Renzi's success at the 2014 EP Elections in a temporal perspective, please refer to Table 3 (“Votes for Italian parties that achieved at least 10% in European elections, 1979-2014 (%)” and to Figure 5 (“Voter turnout in European elections, 1979-2014: Italy in comparison with European average (%)”) in Supplemental data concerning this article.

9. For example, leader effects appear to be stronger in systems and elections where party policies differ little (McAllister 2007; Holmberg and Oscarsson 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stefano Camatarri

Stefano Camatarri (born in 1988) is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Studies at the University of Milano. He has also been a Postgraduate visiting Student at the University of Nottingham (UK). His main research interests concern the comparative study of political behaviour and culture, cognitive politics and experimental political science. Among his more recent publications: “Stili di rappresentanza politica” (with P. Segatti). 2016. In La rappresentanza politica in Italia. Candidati ed elettori nelle elezioni politiche 2013, edited by A. Di Virgilio and P. Segatti. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Mariano Cavataio

Mariano Cavataio (born in 1984) is a scholar in Political Science and Political Sociology. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology at the Università degli Studi di Milano in 2013. His research interests include political behaviour, voting behaviour, political parties, public opinion, corporate social responsibility and business ethics. Dr. Cavataio has written extensively about candidate and leader selection issues and intra-party democracy more generally. Among his more recent publications: “Il profilo socio-demografico dei giocatori d’azzardo italiani: un’analisi basata su dati di sondaggio. L’importanza dell’approccio pragmatico della gambling social responsibility” 2016. In Il gioco d’azzardo in Italia. Contributi per un approccio interdisciplinare, edited by F. La Rosa. Milano: FrancoAngeli.