Follow the Candidates, Not the Parties? Personal Vote in a Regional De-institutionalized Party System

ABSTRACT

This article analyses how personal vote shapes electoral competition and predicts electoral results in a regional de-institutionalized party system. After having analysed the connection between unpredictable political environment and personal vote, we build an original empirical model that explores preferential vote and patterns of re-candidacies and endorsements of the most voted candidates in the Calabrian regional elections. The analysis shows that leading candidates retain a more stable and predictable support over time with respect to parties and that candidates and their system of interactions are able to predict the electoral results better than parties and their alliances.

KEYWORDS:

• Personal vote
• de-institutionalized party system
• Lords of Preferences
• regional elections
• Italy

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this article was presented at the Italian Political Science Association Conference, Cosenza, 12–14 September 2015. We thank Alessandro Chiaramonte, Lorenzo De Sio, Domenico Fruncillo, Nicola Martocchia Diodati, Giancarlo Minaldi, and Aldo Paparo for useful feedbacks on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Vincenzo Emanuele http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1589-5025

Bruno Marino http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9256-5556

Notes

1. See also Tronconi (2010, 2015) on party system instability in Southern Italian regional elections.

2. Detailed data about the electoral results of Calabrian regional elections of 2010 and 2014 can be found on the Italian Ministry of Interior’s website (http://elezionistorico.interno.it).

3. The 16 lists contesting the 2010 regional election in Calabria were: for the centre-right coalition (supporting the Presidential candidate Scopelliti), Popolo della Libertà (PDL), Scopelliti Presidente (Scopelliti Pres.), Unione di Centro (UDC), Insieme per la Calabria (Insieme Calabria), Socialisti Uniti-PSI, Libertà e Autonomia Noi Sud (Noi Sud), Fiamma Tricolore-Destra Sociale; for the centre-left coalition (supporting the Presidential candidate Loiero), Partito Democratico (PD), Autonomia e Diritti (Aut. e Diritti), Rifondazione Comunista-Sinistra Europea-Comunisti Italiani (RC-PDCI), PSI-Sinistra con Vendola (PSI-Vendola), Alleanza per la Calabria (Alleanza Calabria), Slega la Calabria (Slega Calabria); for the other leftist coalition (supporting the Presidential candidate Callipo), Italia dei Valori (IDV), Io Resto in Calabria con Callipo, Lista Pannella-Bonino. Conversely, the 15 lists contesting the regional election in Calabria in 2014 were: for the centre-left coalition (supporting the Presidential candidate Oliverio), Partito Democratico (PD), Oliverio Presidente (Oliverio Pres.), Democratici Progressisti (Dem. Progr.), Calabria in Rete-Campo Democratico (Calabria in Rete), La Sinistra con Speranza (La Sinistra), Autonomia e Diritti (Aut. e Diritti), Centro Democratico (Centro Dem.), Nuovo CDU; for the centre-right coalition (supporting the Presidential candidate Ferro), Forza Italia (FI), Casa delle Libertà (CDL), Fratelli d’Italia-Alleanza Nazionale (FDI-AN); for the centre coalition (supporting the Presidential candidate D’Ascola), Nuovo Centro Destra (NCD), Unione di Centro (UDC); finally, Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) and L’Altra Calabria ran separately with their own Presidential candidate.

4. The calculation of the index has followed Bartolini and Mair’s (1990) rules.

5. By non-national parties we have considered those party lists whose labels do not correspond to national parties’ ones.

6. Other authors, such as De Luca (2005) and Napoli (2005), use a quantitative criterion to select ‘champions of preferences’: having received a high number of preferential votes. Nonetheless, they do not specify the share of votes necessary for a candidate to be qualified as a ‘champion’. Furthermore, note that if we do not apply the 1% criterion and simply include in the analysis all the candidates who either ran in both elections or ran in 2010 and endorsed another candidate in 2014, there are only two minor candidates who should be included in our analysis (Montagnese, who ran for UDC both in 2010, obtaining 312 votes, and in 2014, obtaining 67 votes; Mesiano, who ran for PSI-Vendola in 2010, obtaining 358 votes, and ran for L’Altra Calabria in 2014, obtaining 596 votes). The results presented in the article would do not change if we included these two candidates both in the bivariate correlations analyses and in the multi-variate regressions analyses.

7. All the remaining candidates should be excluded from the analysis given that, by running only in a single election, it is impossible to verify the continuity in their electoral support and therefore assess their influence on the political system.

8. We rely on the total electorate and not on the total number of valid votes to avoid misleading results regarding Lords’ territorial support, since the level of electoral turnout between 2010 and 2014 is highly different even at municipalities’ level and, consequently, the ratio between Lords’ votes and valid votes would have been biased by the shrinking of the denominator. On the contrary, the total electorate is a more stable measure that can be used to assess each Lord’s ability to mobilize his/her supporters over time.

9. Regarding Battaglia D. (2010) endorsing Irto (2014), see Cilione (2014), Corriere della Calabria (2014), Tripepi (2014b), Quotidiano del Sud (2014c). Since the articles connect Irto with many politicians, we have decided to rely on a conservative criterion, only considering Battaglia D. as endorser, being the person who always appears in the articles we have considered. Regarding Bova (2010) endorsing D’Agostino (2014), see Galullo (2014) and Quotidiano del Sud (2014d). Regarding Crinò P. (2010) endorsing Crinò F. (2014), see Albanese (2014). Regarding Caridi (2010) endorsing Cannizzaro (2014) see Gemelli (2014), Cronache del Garantista (2014) and Quotidiano del Sud (2014b). Regarding De Gaetano (2010) endorsing Romeo S. (2014), see Tripodi (2014), Tripepi (2014a) and Quotidiano del Sud (2014e). Finally, on Bilardi (2010) endorsing Arruzzolo (2014), see Quotidiano del Sud (2014a).

10. As the reader can notice, one case involves Pietro Crinò, a Lord in 2010 who decided not to run in the following regional election and instead endorsed his brother Franco in 2014.

11. The choice regarding which party lists to correlate is consistent with the calculation of electoral volatility we have reported in the first section.

12. Note that all the parties for which we hypothesize a correlation have received at least 1% of the votes in either the 2010 or the 2014 election. Therefore, the result would be the same if we do not put the 1% threshold. Similarly, the overall mean of correlations between all parties running in 2010 and all parties running in 2014 would be almost identical (r = .07; N = 240) if we include also the four lists that did not reach 1% (Alleanza per la Calabria, Io Resto in Calabria con Callipo, Lista Pannella-Bonino, Fiamma Tricolore-Destra Sociale).

13. We have run a series of correlation analyses to prove whether the support for parties in the municipalities of RC over time was higher in the past than today. Specifically, we have compared the territorial support for parties in the Calabrian regional elections of 1970 and in the 1975 for the RC province. The results emphasize the strong continuity of the parties’ territorial support over time, thus confirming our expectation that this continuity was higher in the past than today. Just to give a brief example, the highest correlation in the 1970–1975 period concerns the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano), with a Pearsons’ r of 0.88 (p < .001), while the lowest is that of the Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano), with a Pearsons’ r of 0.45 (p < .001). This means that the lowest correlation in the 1970–1975 is higher than the highest correlation in the 2010–2014, as reported in Figure 3.

14. Data on demographic size refer to 2014 and unemployment rate refer to 2013. Both have been taken from ISTAT (www.istat.it). Data on the Italian Communist Party are official electoral results (www.elezionistorico.interno.it). Personal vote is expected to be more able to predict electoral results in smaller municipalities (due to possible closer ties between voters and candidates), in municipalities with a weaker Communist tradition (due to the fact that historically the vote to the Italian Communist Party was less affected by personal ties to candidates) and, finally, in municipalities with a higher unemployment (since in such contexts voters may be more tempted by asking for micro re-distributive policies provided by politicians).

15. We have also performed an identical statistical analysis using as the dependent variable the electoral performance of the three coalitions of parties supporting the three main Presidential candidates in 2014 in RC. The results are extremely similar to those reported in Table 3, and this is not surprising, given that the electoral results of the Presidential arena and of the proportional arena have been almost identical. For this reason, we have decided not to report the results of these additional regression models. All the analyses have been performed by using STATA 12.

16. PRC-PDCI has been excluded from the centre-left coalition in 2010, since the party supported another Presidential candidate in 2014; UDC has been excluded in 2010 for the centre-right coalition since the party supported D’Ascola in 2014.

17. The variable ‘Parties in 2010 supporting a Presidential candidate in 2014’ includes, for Oliverio: PD, PSI-Vendola and Autonomia e Diritti; for Ferro: PDL and Scopelliti Presidente; for D’Ascola: UDC.

18. The variable ‘Lords in 2010 supporting a Presidential candidate in 2014’ includes, for Oliverio: Mazza, Tripodi P.M., Giordano, Nucera G., Bova, De Gaetano and Battaglia D.; for Ferro: Minasi, Nicolò Al., Vilasi G., Caridi, and Crinò; for D’Ascola: Fedele, Imbalzano and Bilardi.

19. We have performed a multicollinearity diagnostic test (by using the command ‘lmcol’ in STATA) that reports no problems for all models; moreover, we have run a test of equality of coefficients (‘test’ in STATA) to test whether the coefficients for Lords is statistically distinguishable from the coefficients related to coalitions (Model 3) and parties (Model 4): the null hypothesis of equality is rejected with p < .001 in both models. Finally, the results are basically identical if we cluster the standard errors in the regressions by municipality and if we control for candidates’ fixed effects.

20. As already mentioned, there was not a centre-leaning electoral coalition in 2010 and therefore the variable concerning the electoral coalition in 2010 is absent in D’Ascola models.

21. The assumption of equality of coefficients is rejected for both Oliverio (Models 3 and 4) and D’Ascola (Model 10), while it is not rejected for Ferro (Models 5 and 6). Furthermore, even these analyses have shown no problems of multicollinearity.