Italy: Between Growing Incongruence and Region-Specific Dynamics

Abstract

Since the early 1990s the Italian political system has undergone substantive change. Politically, there has been the collapse of traditional political parties and the slow rebuilding of a new party system centered on bipolar competition and on an augmented salience of territorial politics. Institutionally, a number of reforms have changed local, regional and national voting systems, and brought about a stronger decentralization of power toward subnational units. These changes appear to have had an impact on the link between regional and national elections. Before the 1992–1994 political turmoil, Italian regional politics was argued to be a minor replication of national themes and trends (De Mucci, 1987; Tronconi and Roux, 2009). The patterns of voting behavior and the format of party competition in regional elections were considered to be completely dependent on national dynamics, the only differences being a lower level of turnout and slightly higher vote swings between elections. In contrast, regional elections appear to have started to follow a generalized pattern of ‘second-order’ electoral behavior precisely during the last two decades (Chiaramonte and Di Virgilio, 2000; Loughlin and Bolgherini, 2006; Tronconi and Roux, 2009). We aim to investigate to what extent regional politics has become independent from national dynamics in the sense of observed diversification of voting behavior between national and regional levels, and amongst regions.