Abstract
This chapter seeks to analyse the actual impact of the 2018 Italian general election on the political and social profile of the Italian parliamentary elite. The two basic questions addressed here are as follows: Is the extent of change brought about by the election comparable to the changes brought about between 2006 and 2013? Are the MPs coming from the two parties supporting the new government (the League and the Five-star Movement) substantially different from those coming from mainstream parties? To address these questions, this chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the political composition of the Lower House elected in 2018 compared to those of the past twelve years. The chapter discusses a typology of MPs to assess changes that have taken place over the course of the past few legislatures. Then, an analysis of the evolution of the different patterns of political selection and political career, across time and by party, is offered.
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Notes
- 1.
All the data presented in this chapter have been drawn from the CIRCaP Observatory of Political Elites and Institutions based at the University of Siena.
- 2.
The decision to focus on Lower House MPs, the ‘Deputati’ (Deputies), has been driven by practical considerations associated with the completeness of the data, and by analytical considerations: as shown in the recent literature (Tronconi and Verzichelli 2014), we do not expect the results to be significantly different by including the data on the Upper House, the Senate, in the analysis; moreover, we confine our analysis to the Lower House for the sake of comparability between the Italian case and other countries.
- 3.
In this contribution, the values of variables related to MPs’ occupations, and to their local-government and party experience, relate to the moment each MP was first elected to Parliament.
- 4.
Since one of the main aims of this contribution is to identify the most important innovations brought about by the 2018 election and identify the evolutionary trends of the Italian parliamentary class, a theory-driven, mutually exclusive, and exhaustive classification of MPs should be preferred to probabilistic clustering techniques.
- 5.
We only consider membership of Second Republic parties up to 2006.
- 6.
For the purposes of this exploratory analysis, we have considered five different types of association: cultural, environmental, feminist, third-sector related and charitable ones.
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Marino, B., Martocchia Diodati, N., Verzichelli, L. (2019). Members of the Chamber of Deputies. In: Ceccarini, L., Newell, J. (eds) The Italian General Election of 2018. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13617-8_12
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