Looking through the mirror: representativeness of the Italian party system before the 2018 General Election

From Firenze University Press Journal: Italian Journal of Electoral Studies (IJES)

Beniamino Masi, Università di Pisa

Since the late 1980s, political parties entered a path of decreasing trust and confidence. Many reasons contributed to this decline, with the results that, today, the decline of these organisations can be seen from many differ-ent points of observation (Ignazi 2020). One of the reasons behind this drop in confidence has been explained by a process of detachment of parties from voters’ social bases, whereas parties have progressively become similar to public agencies, losing their linkage with society (Mair 2013).Political representation is usually referred to as the relationship between voters (or citizens in general) and their elected counterparts (Pitkin 1967), where the former are acting in the name or in trust of the latter. This relationship is often mediated through parties, which are supposed to act as the main link between voters and candidates or elected representatives, and when parties fail to perform this role, the whole representative circuit is affected. For this reason, the theme of representation, and representation of opinions and policy preferences in particular, becomes of particular interest for the under-standing of this complex process of party change and party decline.Departing from this strand of literature, the present work will assess the representativeness of parties running in the 2018 Italian General Election through a partial innovation of the methodology originally proposed by Alvarez et al. (2014) and further discussed by Bright et al. (2020). As a matter of fact, the theme has not been systematically assessed in the previous literature, while still being of great interest for the understanding of the Italian party system and politics. The Italian case is of particular interest since it has been often referred to as an important example of the decay of democracy and representation. Italian parties are fragile and, since the beginning of the so-called “Second Republic”, they tend to suffer from an increasing distrust, which is reflected in membership numbers, turnout rates and party system fragmentation (Pizzimenti 2020).

Trust in political par-ties decreased to a point that in 2018 only 5% of Italian voters declared they trusted them. In this scenario, Italy has become the first Western country where populists gained a majority and formed a coalition government together (Garzia 2018), capitalizing on their discourse highlighting a division between the “good people” and the “corrupt elite” (Mudde 2018). Under this setting, the study of the distance between voters and parties becomes of particular interest for the understanding of the Italian party system.Thanks to the dataset generated from the Italian Voting Advice Application (VAA) Navigatore Elettorale, we were able to calculate an index that measures the distance from each potential voter from its best-matching party or, in other words, a representative deficit. This representative deficit can be considered an indicator of the state of the Italian democracy, and as such it will help to shed some lights on the reasons behind this lack of representativeness of Italian parties in terms of issues covered during the electoral campaign.The contribution is structured as follows.

The first section will be dedicated to a discussion on the meaning of representation and the main challenges related to its analysis and conceptualization. Then, after an analysis of the advantages of using VAA data for assessing congruence between parties and voters, the second section will be devoted to a recognition of the Italian case and a discussion of some of the expectations which will guide our analysis. The third section will be dedicated to an explanation of the data and methods which we used, after which we will present our results. Our findings show a diversified pattern of congruence between parties and voters on different themes, with some unexpected results.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/qoe-10237

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