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ABSTRACT
This article investigates the impact of sub-national contextual variations on the performance of populist actors in a country in which several electorally relevant populist parties exist: Italy. By employing a multi-model Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of the 2018 Italian general election, it explores the extent to which factors such as the distribution of ‘economic losers’ and the impact of migration, political discontent and societal malaise have influenced the performance of the Lega (League) and the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five-star Movement, M5s). The study shows that, while the League has thrived especially in areas characterized by ‘cultural backlash’, but also in contexts characterized by Euroscepticism and societal malaise, the success of the M5s cannot be explained without reference to poor economic and institutional performances. Moreover, by stressing the advantages of assessing sub-national variations, the study encourages us to move away from one-size-fits-all grand narratives that see some factors (or combination of factors) as necessarily impacting populist performance throughout national territories in a consistent manner.
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. We have decided to focus on two parties that – as discussed in Section 3 – are consistently defined as ‘populist’ in the academic literature, and have both grown considerably in-between the latest Italian general elections (2013-2018). The reader will notice that Berlusconi’s Forza Italia is excluded from the present analysis. Firstly, the party has in fact shrunk in recent years. And, second, its characterisation as a ‘populist’ party is contested. While there are scholars that put it squarely into this category (e.g. Albertazzi and McDonnell Citation2015; Zulianello Citation2020), others express doubts about it, due to its ‘conservative connotations’ (Tarchi Citation2008: 92).
2. Here we group Italian regions into three macro-areas, in line with the Italian National Institute for Statistics (e.g. Istat Citation2018a). The areas are constituted by the following regions: the North (i.e. nord-ovest + nord-est): Valle d’Aosta, Emilia-Romagna, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Liguria, Lombardy, Piedmont, Trentino-Alto Adige and Veneto; the Centre (centro): Lazio, Marche, Tuscany and Umbria; the South (sud + isole): Abruzzo, Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, Sardinia and Sicily.
3. Significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
4. Whereas the M5s lost votes in four regions between the 2013 and 2018 elections – i.e. Friuli Venezia-Giulia (−2.6 percentage points), Liguria (−2.0), Veneto (−1.9) and Piedmont (−1.0) – the League increased its vote share in every single region. Hence no region is found to be fully out of the outcome set LEAGUEBKT in our study – a very remarkable aspect of this election.
5. See for a list of thresholds for calibration, as well as the list of regions that match the threshold for full membership and non-membership.
6. With a consistency of 0.918, only condition PQOG achieves the 0.9 minimum suggested in the literature; however, its low RoN (relevance of necessity) value, i.e. 0.619, means that we cannot consider it necessary for the outcome M5SBKT to occur (see Schneider and Wagemann Citation2012). This is hardly surprising, as the quality of regional government is low in most Italian regions (see above). In other words, there are more instances of the alleged condition than of the outcome M5SBKT.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Daniele Albertazzi
Daniele Albertazzi is Reader in Politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLSIS) of the University of Birmingham (UK) and principal investigator for the #PopulismInAction project, funded by the ESRC (ES/R011540/1). Daniele is the co-editor (with Davide Vampa) of Populism and New Patterns of Political Competition in Western Europe (Routledge, 2021) and the co-author (with Duncan McDonnell) of Populists in Power (Routledge, 2015).
Mattia Zulianello
Mattia Zulianello is a Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLSIS) of the University of Birmingham (UK). His research interest include populist parties, comparative politics, party competition and mixed-method research, and his works have appeared in several international journals. His first book, entitled Anti-system Parties: From Parliamentary Breakthrough to Government’ was published by Routledge (Extremism and Democracy Series) in 2019.