Italy, the fair land there where the Sì doth sound: when the places take revenge

ABSTRACT

This article provides empirical evidence on the determinants of the vote in favour of reducing the number of the Members of Parliament, the issue covered by Italy’s referendum held on 20–21 September 2020. Consistent with the literature on the geography of discontent, the social factors – age, education and income – play a significant role. Among the determinants, however, the political factor stands out, namely the vote for the Five Star Movement in the 2018 elections. This study applies a place-based approach, in which the unit of analysis is the Local Labour System, a socio-economic territorial unit that embeds the vote in the places where people’s lives actually occur. Therefore, local communities become protagonists of the vote, which in this occurrence, is an anti-political-establishment vote because they feel left behind by policy and politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Geography of discontent
• places left behind
• populism
• Five Star Movement
• regional inequalities
• inner areas

JEL Classifications:

• D72
• R10

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the anonymous referee for his helpful comments. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The article does not mention the Italian Lega Nord because it played a negligible role as regards the referendum. Formally, the Lega Nord supported the referendum, as most of the other Italian political parties did. The difference between the Lega Nord and the M5S, as populist parties, is that the former is a mainstream centre-right governing party since 1994, and as such is organic to the political establishment, while the latter has anti-political-establishment as one of its founding values. This makes the Lega Nord’s stance in favour of reducing the number of MPs contradictory. The explanation of this contradiction would require a broad and in-depth thought on the current Italian political arena, which is beyond the scope of this work.

2 Results of the regressions are available upon request.