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ABSTRACT
This article focuses on Italian regional chief executives and aims to investigate if and how the Italian regionalization process has affected regional chief executives’ career trajectories. Our analysis is based on an original dataset on political careers of regional heads of government in Italy from 1970 to 2015. After presenting our two research expectations, we find that the direct election of regional presidents and the decentralization process have gone hand in hand with the selection of more regional political outsiders and visible politicians as well as with a higher integration between institutional levels in terms of career paths
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. More precisely, we can speak of neo-parliamentarism or semi-parliamentarism (Duverger, Citation1986): the chief executive is directly elected by voters and there is a confidence relationship between parliament and government, based on the simul stabunt vel simul cadent principle. Therefore, the termination of executive government always leads to the dissolution of the assembly and to new elections.
2. This label – as well as that of climbers – has been used by Martocchia Diodati and Verzichelli (Citation2017) with regard to Italian ministers’ profiles and it is here re-adapted to regional presidents. Thus, we do not consider technocrats with specific policy expertise, but politicians with skills more in line with the personalisation of politics and in particular with nationwide visibility. Similarly, we take into account leaders without territorial links, who simply jump to the fore. The operationalization of this concept is provided in the fourth section.
3. On this point, it is worth making a further clarification. Here, we are specifically interested in how general electoral rules shape the profile of successful politicians, under an ‘else equal condition.’ It may well be that parties can select different profiles, depending on open or closed selection procedures (e.g. Sandri et al., Citation2015b). Nonetheless, studies on how parties organize in different institutional settings (i.e. parliamentary vs. presidentialized) have provided evidence that institutional patterns come first and party variables are at most likely to foster or hinder systemic effects (Siavelis and Morgenstern, Citation2008: 10; Passarelli, Citation2015). The major effect is thus likely to go from electoral rules to intra-party procedures, rather than the other way round. This is confirmed by studies on party primaries, such as Sandri et al. (Citation2015a). Moreover, Samuels and Shugart (Citation2010) have claimed that, whatever the role of internal factors, different parties (arguably characterized by different intra-party selection rules) tend to propose similar politicians’ profiles, due to institutional pressures. Based on this literature, we want to observe (if any) the overall effect on regional chief executives and, therefore, we will not consider intra-party procedures in our analysis.
4. We count a new government where there is a (1) change of chief executive; (2) change of regional cabinet party composition and/or (3) regional election.
5. Only concluded terms are considered.
6. White-Catholic and Red-Communist subcultures were deeply rooted in the North-East (Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and Trentino-Alto Adige) and in the Centre of Italy (Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Umbria), respectively (e.g. Caciagli, Citation1988).
7. From 1995 to 1999, this principle was valid only for the two first years of the legislative term. Indeed, in three regions (Calabria, Campania, Molise), there was a change of executive within the same legislative term after this threshold. Nonetheless, we take 1995 as the general watershed, since it has been shown that in hybrid systems the ‘presidential’ facet of institutional setting is likely to ‘contaminate’ the parliamentary one, and thus shape the career paths of all chief executives (Samuels and Shugart, Citation2010: 70).
8. It is worth noting that we deal with the total population for the considered period. This could lead to epistemological and methodological pitfalls when it comes to use statistical significance tests. These tests rely on the assumption that the units of analysis come from a random sample, which could be representative of the whole population. In our case, we are instead confronted with non-repeatable data. However, we can claim that our N is likely to be representative of further observations, made under similar contextual features. For a discussion and relevant references, see Müller-Rommel and Vercesi (Citation2017: 257).
9. We also tested differences with regard to socio-demographic background indicators, such as age, level of education and occupation. However, findings did not reveal substantial differences between the periods in question.