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Political Participation and Electoral Participation in Italy

A Comparison

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The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Problems

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Abstract

Political participation is a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon regarding most people in their daily life. The aim of this work is to measure the level of political involvement in the Italian regions through the construction of a composite index. The indicators used are discussing political issues more than once a week, taking part in political meetings, taking part in political demonstrations, listening to political debate, volunteering for a political party, giving money to a political party, and seeking information on politics once a week. They refer to the year 2018 and were derived from Indagine Multiscopo sulle famiglie, which is a survey conducted since 1993 by ISTAT with the aim of collecting information about Italian citizens’ life. The indicators chosen have been synthesized through the MPI method (Mazziotta and Pareto, Un indicatore sintetico di dotazione infrastrutturale: il metodo della penalità per coefficiente di variazione, in Lo sviluppo regionale nell’Unione Europea- Obiettivi, strategie, politiche, Atti della XXVIII Conferenza Italiana di Scienze Regionali, AISRe, Bolzano, 2007), which allows the elaboration of a synthetic measure of a multidimensional phenomenon when each component cannot be replaced with the others. In this study, after having constructed an index of political participation, it was decided to correlate the participatory phenomenon with electoral participation in order to analyze the relationship between these two phenomena. Against all expectations, this study has shown a low correlation between the two phenomena, thus suggesting that most of the people involved in forms of conventional participation are not the same as those who go to the polling station.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Channel & Retail Lab, SDA Bocconi School of Management, Milan, Italy

    Marianna Bartiromo

  2. Department of Political Sciences, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy

    Enrico Ivaldi

  3. C.I.E.L.I., the Italian Centre of Excellence on Logistics Transports and Infrastructures, Genoa, Italy

    Enrico Ivaldi

  4. Centro de Investigaciones en Econometría – CIE, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Enrico Ivaldi

Authors
  1. Marianna Bartiromo
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  2. Enrico Ivaldi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marianna Bartiromo .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Work and Social Welfare, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Rajendra Baikady

  2. Department of Social Work, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

    S.M Sajid

  3. Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland

    Jaroslaw Przeperski

  4. Department of Social Work, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, South Africa

    Varoshini Nadesan

  5. Inst of Social Welfare & Res, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    Islam Rezaul

  6. Sch of Philosophy & Social Development, Shandong University, Central Campus, Jinan, China

    Jianguo Gao

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Bartiromo, M., Ivaldi, E. (2022). Political Participation and Electoral Participation in Italy. In: Baikady, R., Sajid, S., Przeperski, J., Nadesan, V., Rezaul, I., Gao, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Problems. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68127-2_255-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68127-2_255-1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-68127-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-68127-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Social SciencesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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