Society and territory: making sense of Italian populism from a historical perspective

ABSTRACT

Italy is depicted as a populist promised land. Especially within Western Europe, Italy is an outlier in terms of support for and varieties of populist parties. Yet, common explanations of populism do not fully account for the Italian exceptionality, while single-country studies often present time-wise limited focus or anecdotical evidence. This article contributes by providing a novel interpretation of Italian populism since 1945 through a three-step process. First, the Italian populist success is theoretically linked to societal anti-parliamentarism and anti-elitism, whose roots date back to the formation of the unitary state and its institutional weakness. Second, it is argued that traditional intra-country differences in terms of voting behavior still matter when it comes to providing the opportunity structure for populist parties. Finally, a preliminary empirical analysis shows that – in line with expectations – different political traditions across the national territory are likely to determine the success of specific types of populism. The findings are relevant for the generation of new hypotheses about the societal origins of contemporary populist parties.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-institutionalism
• territorial vote
• populist voter
• populist types
• Italian parties
• Italian sub-cultures

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. I also thank Tobias Lenz, Volker Kirchberg, Michael Koß, Sven Kramer, Roberto Nigro, Christian Welzel, and especially Jan Berz and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel for comments at an early stage of the research.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. See Lewis, P, Clarke S, Barr C, Holder J and Kommenda N (2018) Revealed: One in Four Europeans Vote Populist. The Guardian, 20 November.

2. Based on votes for the general election, first chamber. All electoral results are available in the official Interior Ministry’s website on elections https://elezionistorico.interno.gov.it. See Section 4 for the list of populist parties.

3. See Henley, J (2018) How Populism Emerged as an Electoral Force in Europe. The Guardian, 20 November. The article is based on data from Rooduijn et al. (2019).

4. After accepting the legitimacy of the elections as the rule of game in the 1910s, Catholics entered the political competition by establishing the People’s Party in 1919, when Italy moved towards mass politics after World War I. However, the Italian state and the Catholic Church recognized each other as legitimate actors only in 1929, when Mussolini signed a pact of cohabitation and mutual influence with the Church. This pact, which was slightly revised in 1984, gave to the Church a sovereign territory, which is now Vatican City.

5. For this article’s purposes, I focus only on party supply. However, the same argument holds with populist social movements, which have influenced Italian political life throughout the republican history, even when they have not turned into a party.

6. It has been pointed out that expert judgements about party populist positions provide reliable measures, also when validated against party manifestos’ analyses (Norris 2019, 992).

7. Building on the used sources, the classification refers to the populist content of party programs, rather than single leaders’ speeches and discourses. For this reason, the Italian Democratic Party is not part of the list. Its programs have not been considered populist by the specialized literature, even when the rhetoric of its former leader Matteo Renzi (2014–2018, with a short break in 2017) presented populist traits (e.g., Bordignon 2014; Biorcio 2015). Similarly, Brothers of Italy can be considered populist (Taggart and Pirro 2021), although its leader Giorgia Meloni ‘accurately choose[s] to adopt a political communication style less characterised by populist elements’ (Bracciale and Martella 2017, 1324). I thank an anonymous reviewer for having drawn my attention to this issue.

8. This did not happen to the former anti-system parties (Communists and Post-Fascists), which could survive and moderate their profile, becoming coalitionable parties in subsequent governments.

9. Another West European country where anti-party sentiments have been traditionally widespread is France; it is not coincidence that French Poujadism was one of the first modern populist manifestations occurred after World War II, together with the two mentioned Italian cases. However, the French Fifth Republic promoted by Charles De Gaulle was successful in ‘institutionalizing’ the opposition to political parties, by establishing strong and personalized institutions as substitutes of weak parties. In Italy, a similar operation did not take place: as soon as the party system of the first fifty years of the republic collapsed, the road for poorly organized and personalized parties opened.

10. See ‘The Main Roots of Italian Populism’, by Flavio Chiapponi on http://trulies-europe.de.

11. It is no coincidence that, during the 2018 electoral campaign for the national parliament, the 5SM proposed a ministerial team for the new government made up of only non-partisan experts (which the professor of Private Law and later Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte was part of).

12. All calculations are based on data provided by the archive of the electoral results of the Istituto Cattaneo (https://www.cattaneo.org/dati/archivio-dati-elettorali/elezioni-politiche) and, when not available, by the data of the Italian Ministry of the Interior (https://elezionistorico.interno.gov.it).

13. I did not include the Aosta Valley, because ofits special status among the electoral districts, which does not make it comparable.