Looking retrospectively at the 2018 Italian general election: the state of the economy and the presence of foreigners

ABSTRACT

Scholars agree that two major issues oriented voting behaviours during the Italian general election of 2018. The first was the state of the economy, which had not yet recovered from the lowest points reached during the Great Recession, but had nevertheless exhibited some marginal improvement. The second issue originated from another crisis, the refugee and asylum emergency, which contributed to increasing the presence of foreigners in Italy and the salience of the migration issue. The article investigates the impact of these two types of problem on the 2018 election results by using aggregated objective data at the municipal level. It finds confirmation of the two issues’ impact on retrospective punishment of the incumbent Democratic Party also when using spatial regression models distinguishing the direct influence and the spill-over effects of the poor state of the economy and an increase in the size of the foreign population.

KEYWORDS:

• Italy
• election
• retrospective vote
• economic vote
• migration
• spatial regression

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the four referees of the journals for their comments and suggestions; I know I have been unable to follow all of their advices but they have been useful in any case. Many thanks to Massimiliano Bratti for the help in the initial phases of the research.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. We consider the list votes in the proportional part of the ballot, and exclude data from the Valle d’Aosta due to the distinctiveness of its electoral system and competition. Owing to the administrative changes made since the preceding election, and to the need to compare the results with those of 2013, we have had to reconstruct and match as closely as possible the territorial arrangement in that year. Robustness checks with provincial data and alternative specifications are included in the online appendix.

2. These results are also confirmed by those presented in Table A.3 of the online appendix, which uses the provincial, instead of the municipal, level of analysis.

3. A cursory replication of our model on the previous 2013 election also confirms the importance of the economic variable but not that of the increase of foreigners, further signalling the specificity of the retrospective profile of the 2018 ballot.

4. Because of the ‘inherent symmetry of interactive models’ (Berry, Golder, and Milton 2012, 216), it is worth exploring how each of the two variables conditions the effect of the other. It is apparent that, in the second plot, the more compact distribution of immigration dynamics (represented by the background histogram) produces very few substantial variations in the impact of unemployment. The robustness checks at the provincial level presented in the online appendix show some clearer conditional effects.

5. Using provincial data, the sign and statistical significance of the direct internal effects remain intact, while the external influence becomes largely insignificant, confirming this idea of compensation between opposite trends at this larger scale.

6. For both cases, the spill-overs are row-normalized, so that the overall impact of close units totals one, and is divided amongst the influential units according to the connectivity rules.

7. Because of the mutual influence between observations, in which each unit is influenced and, in turn, influences nearby units, the immediate outputs of spatial regression models should not be interpreted directly but enter into a recursive computation of their reciprocal effects. In Table 2 we already report the outcomes of those estimates: direct effects relate to the within-unit own impact of the independent on the dependent variable, while the indirect effects represent the average spill-over effects that derive from contiguous or nearby units. Total effects report the sum of those two components with the appropriate standard errors and, thus, confidence intervals.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marco Giuliani

Marco Giuliani is Full Professor in Political science at the Università degli studi di Milano (Italy). His main research interests are in the areas of electoral studies, public policy and in the relationship between the economic and political arenas.