Alessandro Chiaramonte, Vincenzo Emanuele, N. Maggini, Aldo Paparo
{"title":"Radical-Right Surge in a Deinstitutionalised Party System: The 2022 Italian General Election","authors":"Alessandro Chiaramonte, Vincenzo Emanuele, N. Maggini, Aldo Paparo","doi":"10.1080/13608746.2022.2160088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2022.2160088","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The 2022 Italian general election marked a new step in the unprecedented instability experienced by the Italian party system over the past 15 years. This article presents and discusses the outcome of the election within the deinstitutionalised Italian party system. The most remarkable results were the unprecedented success of the radical-right FDI (Fratelli d’Italia – Brothers of Italy) led by Giorgia Meloni (who would become the first female prime minister in Italy) and a historic drop in voter turnout. In particular, by employing original individual-level survey data, we investigate the impact of territory on the vote, the individual-level dynamics behind the results, and the overall picture emerging in terms of the Italian party system.","PeriodicalId":47304,"journal":{"name":"South European Society and Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82184911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Back to the Post-Fascist Past or Landing in the Populist Radical Right? The Brothers of Italy Between Continuity and Change","authors":"Leonardo Puleo, Gianluca Piccolino","doi":"10.1080/13608746.2022.2126247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2022.2126247","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) is the new rising star of Italian politics. Scholars and pundits briskly categorised it as a (new) populist radical right (PRR) party. Still, FdI’s newness needs to be properly framed. A splinter party of the Popolo della Libertà, it claims a direct lineage with the Alleanza Nazionale – two cases not easily agglutinated into the PRR family. The article analyses the (dis)continuity associated with FdI, examining ideology, organisation, and the continuity of elites. It demonstrates that FdI’s organisation and political elites largely overlap with its predecessor parties. However, FdI accomplished a major ideological rebranding, positioning itself as radically different from both the mainstream centre-right and the post-fascist tradition of the Italian right.","PeriodicalId":47304,"journal":{"name":"South European Society and Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91218654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Yet Another Populist Party? Understanding the Rise of Brothers of Italy","authors":"G. Baldini, Filippo Tronconi, Davide Angelucci","doi":"10.1080/13608746.2022.2159625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2022.2159625","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT From its 2012 beginnings as a marginal radical right splinter group, in the 2022 general election ‘Fratelli d’Italia’ (Brothers of Italy, FdI) was the most voted party and its leader, Giorgia Meloni, became the first Italian female Prime minister. While both leader and party can be classified as belonging to the populist radical right family, we argue that FdI must be understood also as a ‘rooted newcomer’, i.e. a party that can count on pre-existing organisational resources, building its appeal also on symbolic elements already familiar to the electorate when the party was formed. Focusing on the supply side, we tackle some of the main open questions related to the party’s ambivalent nature, often fluctuating between a post-fascist profile and a frequently reiterated support for other European radical right illiberal leaders and more moderate positions. We identify the politics of illiberalism as the key challenge the party faces in its transition from opposition to government.","PeriodicalId":47304,"journal":{"name":"South European Society and Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86319804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Italian Democratic Party at the Crossroad: Party Activism and the Middle-Level Élite","authors":"Paola Bordandini, C. Baccetti, L. Sartori","doi":"10.1080/13608746.2022.2161713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2022.2161713","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT We examine the middle-level élite of the Italian Democratic Party (Partito democratico, PD) and its founding parties, Democrats of the Left (Democratici di Sinistra, DS) and The Daisy (La Margherita, DL), over fifteen years (2004–2019). Our original dataset on national delegates comes from 2373 questionnaires collected at eight national party congresses. Inspired by Whiteley and Seyd’s concepts of low and high-intensity participation, we evaluate the relative weight of the various types of incentive in the two (internal and external) forms of party activism. Party activism is central to understanding the profound cultural, organisational, and electoral crisis that has put the PD at a crossroad and has led current secretary Letta to call for a ‘Constituent Congress of the New PD’.","PeriodicalId":47304,"journal":{"name":"South European Society and Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86841609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Your Luck is Our Luck’: Covid-19, the Radical Right and Low Polarisation in the 2022 Portuguese Elections","authors":"José Santana-Pereira, Elisabetta De Giorgi","doi":"10.1080/13608746.2023.2191417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2023.2191417","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the 2022 Portuguese legislative elections, held nearly two years after the pandemic hit the country, the incumbent Socialists improved their position, being now able to govern with an absolute majority, while populist radical right Chega experienced considerable growth. Was the pandemic a relevant factor for vote choice in these elections? The main goal of this article is to shed light on this matter. In addition to portraying this election’s background and results, we describe the degree of COVID-19-related polarisation in Portugal, analyse the salience of the pandemic in the campaign and measure the relative impact of pandemic-related perceptions vs other variables on voting behaviour. Our findings reveal that, although there was little politicisation of the pandemic and the incumbent enjoyed high levels of support among both political elites and public opinion, Chega, which was less involved in rallying around the flag, arguably sent signals that made COVID-19-related assessments relevant in terms of voting behaviour.","PeriodicalId":47304,"journal":{"name":"South European Society and Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84723768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Didem Türkoğlu, Meltem Odabaş, Doruk Tunaoglu, Mustafa Yavaş
{"title":"Political Polarisation on Social Media: Competing Understandings of Democracy in Turkey","authors":"Didem Türkoğlu, Meltem Odabaş, Doruk Tunaoglu, Mustafa Yavaş","doi":"10.1080/13608746.2023.2200901","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2023.2200901","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Heightened political polarisation threatens democratic stability. While prior studies find polarisation in competing groups’ deployment of different terminologies to describe the same topic, we emphasise that it can also be evident in groups’ attachment of different meanings to the same terminology. Competition for dominance in the public sphere is reflected in social media which become sites of contestation, showcasing antagonistic claims of legitimacy. In a case-study of the June 2019 rerun Istanbul elections in Turkey, we used qualitative and computational methods to analyse approximately 116,000 tweets, focusing on discussions around the themes of ‘democracy’, ‘elections’, and ‘public service’. Twitter users associated the act of casting a vote not only with electing the candidate, but also with a competition over the future of Turkish democracy.","PeriodicalId":47304,"journal":{"name":"South European Society and Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79096381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Explaining Morality Policy Coalitions in Spanish Parliamentary Votes: The Interaction of the Church-State Conflict and Territorial Politics","authors":"M. Léon, Manuel Alvariño, Llorenç Soler-Buades","doi":"10.1080/13608746.2022.2132614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2022.2132614","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article we empirically explore the impact of the state-Church conflict on progressive moral policies. Taking Spain as a case study, we analyse the parliamentary interaction of political parties in a number of policy domains that provoke a moral conflict. We examine the principal legislative acts relating to abortion, divorce, same-sex marriage, euthanasia and gender equality from the early 1980s to 2021. We look beyond the religious divide and argue that its interaction with territorial politics, which is in turn shaped by specific institutional features, explains the formation of political coalitions that are conducive to moral legislation. Furthermore, we show that political coalitions vary depending on how explicit or implicit a given morality conflict is.","PeriodicalId":47304,"journal":{"name":"South European Society and Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79019969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Absolute and Benchmarked Economic Voting. A Subnational Perspective on a Decade of Elections in Southern Europe","authors":"M. Giuliani","doi":"10.1080/13608746.2023.2202468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2023.2202468","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article analyses the 15 elections that took place between 2010 and 2019 in four South European countries – Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain – through the lenses of the retrospective vote theory. The large within-country variation of economic conditions justifies the adoption of an original subnational perspective, while the explicit test of alternative economic quantities and horizons provides a more credible assessment of voters’ behaviours. Besides offering a taxonomy of local retrospective voting, the research found that citizens assessed the incumbents against regional unemployment levels and national growth dynamics, further benchmarking the local economic conditions against their past performances. These results give credit to the idea that the South European electorate shares similar references in assessing the economic competences of incumbent governments.","PeriodicalId":47304,"journal":{"name":"South European Society and Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85979808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: The Evolution of Democratic Digital Innovations in Podemos","authors":"Marco Meloni, Fabio G. Lupato","doi":"10.1080/13608746.2022.2161973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2022.2161973","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT While the digitalisation of political parties is increasingly analysed, less attention has been paid to the evolution of digital procedures and their consequences on intra-party democracy and party change. We propose a typology for identifying different types of evolution processes (consolidation, reconfiguration, mutation, and elimination) using the Spanish party Podemos paradigmatic case. Our analysis points out the centrality of hard and soft setbacks in the evolution of the digital procedures of the party. Findings indicate the relevance of different dynamics, such as institutionalisation, personalisation, and factionalism, jointly with other internal and external factors. Studying the evolution of digital party procedures is relevant for tracing party change in digital parties and other parties that are experiencing digitalisation processes.","PeriodicalId":47304,"journal":{"name":"South European Society and Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88390936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Affective and Territorial Polarisation: The Impact on Vote Choice in Spain","authors":"T. Rodon","doi":"10.1080/13608746.2022.2044235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2022.2044235","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT What is the effect of affective polarisation on vote choice? Despite the growing interest in affective polarisation, scholars still do not fully understand the relationship between partisan affective polarisation and political behaviour. Crucially, most existing studies have assumed, often by default, that affective polarisation mainly occurs along a single politicised partisan identity. This article addresses the hitherto neglected relationship between affective polarisation and vote choice in Spain, where distrust between different and opposite groups occurs both on ideological and territorial terms. Using rich panel data, the study findings show that both affective polarisation types are significant predictors of vote choice. While affectively partisan-polarised voters are more likely to support the left, affectively polarised voters on the territorial dimension are more likely to support the right.","PeriodicalId":47304,"journal":{"name":"South European Society and Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82661362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}