Partisanship and the swing-vote in the 2010s: The Italian case (very preliminary draft)

Paolo Bellucci University of Siena [email protected]

Paper presented to the ECPR General Conference, University of Glasgow, September 3-6 2014; Panel on Partisanship Revisited.

Abstract The recent Italian 2013 legislative elections show the largest volatility in the history of the Italian Republic: 39% of voters changed their previous vote. Although many reasons can explain such result (as a consequence of a severe economic crisis and of heightened distrust in established parties), this calls into question the extent and nature of partisanship among Italians. Relying on an Itanes 5 wave panel surveyed between 2011 and 2013, and employing a battery of indicators of partisanship based on the Index of Identification with a Psychological Group, the paper assesses whether contemporary partisanship in Italy is best seen as an attitude or as a form of social identity.

1. Introduction

Partisanship - the relationship which links citizens to parties and that pushes voters to repeatedly cast a ballot (in most cases) for the same parties - is a matter of debate in contemporary (established) democracies. The main questions are: 1) whether such a relationship exists at all; 2) the sources and nature of partisan attachments. An extensive literature has dealt with the waning of partisans (parties without partisans, in the apt title of the book edited by Dalton and Wattenberg, 2000) although the verdict is still open on the actual fading of partisan voters (see contra Berglund at al., 2005 and Schmitt, 2009). The erosion of cleavage parties, brought about by socio-economic modernisation which undermined the very social bases of class, religion and territory as sources of political identities, is singled out as the main culprit of the progressive decoupling of parties and voters. Further, rising electoral volatility (Mair, 2013) has been matched by the emergence of new parties increasingly appearing in Western Europe (Bolleyer, 2013), disrupting traditional party system environments and providing voters with novel – although often unstable - political actors. The political supply side has shown then an overall weakening of the parties and a blurring of their images, thus affecting one end in the continuum of party- voters relationship. Which likely impacts of the willingness/capacity of voters to develop stable party allegiances.

On the demand side, however, this does not mean that voters are necessarily impervious to developing partisan attachments or attitudes to changing/new parties. Although much evidence supports the notion that party identification in Europe is nothing more than the current voting intention/preference (Thomassen and Rosema, 2009), partisanship can usefully be conceptualised differently, as party evaluations (Rosema, 2004), party attitudes or predispositions (Pappi, 1996). Actually one review argues that two notions of partisanship have evolved in the literature (Bartle and Bellucci, 2009): one based on social identity theory (Tajfel, 1981) and one based on attitudes (Petty and Cacioppo, 1981), that is as a generalised and enduring response to an object, the party.

1 According to the social identity perspective, partisanship is founded on a sense of ‘we-feeling’, the perception of a shared interdependence or common fate. The US Columbia School and the European Rokkan-Lipset tradition both conceptualized the ‘we-feeling’ as based on primary groups belonging, such as class, religion and territory. In particular, European cleavage parties were associated to (better: were able to develop) forms of partisanship based on people’ pre-political allegiances which provided the sources of party support. Also the Michigan School – which introduced the social-psychological approach - conceptualized partisanship as a weak form of social identity (the original definition of party identification as ‘an affective attachment to an important group object in the environment’ [Campbell et al., 1960, 143]), although allegiances were based, rather than primary groups, on secondary groups such as the parties themselves or partisan groups or fellow party voters. The alternative attitudinal perspective to partisanship is based on the notion of a positive or negative disposition towards parties, which may stem from numerous different sources: party performance (Fiorina, 1981), issue preferences (Adams, 2001), ideology (Bellucci et al. 2010), leaders evaluations (Garzia, 2014). Partisanship as an attitude has been primarily associated to research on instrumental political behaviour, based on people’s reasoning and evaluation of party supply and performance. Attitudinal partisanship is, in brief, a political predisposition to support a party open however to updating processes based on experience, a sort of Bayesian prior representing voters summary experiences and information on parties performance (Bartle and Bellucci, 2009, 13).

It is enticing to connect social identity partisanship with traditional (cleavage based or just stable) parties while associating attitudinal partisanship to catch-all parties (or just to new parties), so to adjust peoples’ evolving partisan allegiances to the changing reality of parties. Such comparison is however not warranted, since social identity partisanship need not to be associated to social cleavages, as the US case illustrates while, as social psychology research has shown concerning the emergence of in-group favoritism under minimal conditions (that is, in experimental settings people develop social identities with groups designated by other than a common label; Huddy, 2001), even new parties can elicit significant level of partisan identification. Conceptualising partisanship as a social identity could then provide an answer to the declining strength of traditional religion or occupational groups as basis of party support, which would leave unexplained the contemporary origin of partisan allegiances. Huddy and Mason (2010) argue that ‘social identity theory provides a more plausible and purely psychological alternative [to the traditional sociological base of party support] in which partisan identity rests on perceived similarity to typical partisans’ (4). Greene (1999; 2004; 2002; 2005) has pioneered such approach in the US context, relying on standard multi-item scale used to assess social identity, employing ten items - featuring Mael and Tetrick’s (1992) Identification with a Psychological Group (IDPG) scale - to gauge partisanship. Greene maintains that social identification with a political party is an important additional element of partisanship, traditionally seen only as social-psychological attachment, supplementing the dimensions of affection and cognition and showed such a scale to differentiate – over and beyond the standard US seven point scale - feelings toward candidates and parties, party support and levels of party involvement.

The exercise carried out in this paper is to compare the standard CSES measure of partisanship – employed in most European studies – with the IDPD scale. Both were included in a panel conducted by the Italian National Election Study in 2011-13 with the aim to comparatively assess their measurement properties and their behavioural political consequences. The assumption we move on is that the CSES measure of Closeness To Party is

2 tapping an attitude – based mainly on ideological/issues affinity – so our overall goal is to assess whether partisanship in Italy is best seen as an attitude or as a form of social identity. In order to do so we inquiry first into their reciprocal relationship, assess their capacity to distinguish in-group – out-group partisan objects, analyse then the determinants of Closeness To Party and Party Social Identity, and finally ascertain their explicative contribution to a model of party vote in the 2013 election.

2. Partisanship in the 2011-13 political cycle

The current analysis relies on a five-wave panel surveyed across two unanticipated and unambiguous economic and political shocks Italy experienced between 2011 and 20131. In essence: after the landslide victory of Berlusconi’s led People of Freedom (PoF) in 2008 the centre-right government – hit by a worsening economic and financial crisis - experienced a severe political decline. It was ousted from government and replaced in November 2011 by a «technical cabinet» backed in Parliament by a grand coalition of the main parties. The ensuing 2013 elections showed great vote losses for both the right-wing PoF (down to 21.3% from the 37.2% polled in 2008) and for the left-wing Democratic Party (DP) (which obtained 25.5% of the vote, likewise lower than the 2008’s result of 33.1%). Conversely the Five Star Movement (5SM), an anti-political group founded by a comedian-turned-blogger Beppe Grillo, which contested a national election for the first time, became the second largest party in the house (with 25.1% of the votes). Incumbent premier Monti’s new centrist party – Civic Choice – polled just 10.8%. An astonishing number of at least 10 new lists contested the elections nationally, four of which obtained seats at the Lower House.

The electoral results showed the greatest vote-swing in the history of the Italian Republic, with an index of aggregate volatility of 39.1%, even above the 36.7% level reached in the first election of the Second Republic in 1994. Although many reasons can explain such result (as a consequence of a severe economic crisis and of distrust in established parties; see Bellucci, 2014; Bellucci and Maraffi, 2014), this calls into question the extent and nature of current partisanship among Italians.

Parties enjoy a very low esteem: 88.6% of Italians report little or no trust at all in parties in the on-line survey in Spring 2011 (comparable evidence come from the parallel CATI survey – 87.8% - as well as from the face-to-face one in Spring 2013 – 90.3%). However, requested to state whether they usually think of themselves as close to any particular party (the standard CSES partisanship question) a high number (84.4%) report so in 2011 (the available evidence from CATI and CAPI survey is lower, respectively 46.8% in 2011/ 67.9% in 2013 - and 65.6% in 2013). Overall, then, in the first Spring 2011 wave 15.6% of respondents reported not to be

1 The data used in the paper comes from an ITANES inter-electoral panel study conducted via online interviews (CAWI) with a representative sample of the adult population with Internet access (recruited by the polling agency SWG) and via telephone interviews (CATI) with a representative sample of the adult population with landlines (recruited by the survey centres of the University of Milan, Milan Bicocca and Siena), as part of an experimental study on the impact of survey modes comparing telephone, online and face to face interviews. We report here only the CAWI results. The survey was administered in spring 2011, fall 2011, spring 2012, fall 2012 and winter 2013. Of the initial on-line sample (N. = 1,500), 61% of respondents (N. = 908) completed all five5 waves. Funds provided by the Italian Ministry of Education and University Prin grants n. 20083P4BYT (2010-11) (principal investigators: Paolo Bellucci, University of Siena, and Marco Maraffi, University of Milan) and n. 2010943X4L_012 (2013-16) (principal investigator: Paolo Segatti , University of Milan).

3 close to any party, 37,7% to be just a sympathiser of a party, 32.3% to be fairly close to a party, and 14.5% to be very close to a party2.

Those reporting being close to a party were then presented with a battery of 10 items comprising the Identification with a Psychological Group (IDPG) scale. Table 1 shows the distribution of answers. Factor analysing the items yields a two dimension solution (explaining 50% of the variance of the original variables) where 9 out of the 10 items load on the first dimension. Building a scale averaging the answers to the 10 items scaled 1 to 3 (from disagree to agree) yields a Cronbach’s Alpha of 0.66. A truncated version of 4 items (Weisberg and Hasecke, 1999) shows a Crombach’s Alpha of 0.72. Since the two scales correlates highly (R=. 91) and given that the 4 item scale minimises missing data, the latter will be used hereafter.

Table 1 about here

For each party to which respondents report to be close, we have then two independent measurements of partisanship: Closeness To Party (CTP) and Party Social Identity scale (PSI), both with a 1-3 range (higher scores indicating greater strength). Table 2 shows the mean values of them: on average PSI exhibits a greater intensity (2.05) than CTP (1.70), a difference statistically significant (t = -15.6; p= .000) (Table 2). As expected, the two measures are inter- correlated (R = .46; Table 3, panel A) although they clearly do not overlap. The validity of the PSI scale is shown by the increasing intensity of PSI moving from merely party sympathisers to people feeling very close to a party (Table 3, panel B). The correlation between the two scales shows the highest value for the Northern League and, surprisingly, for the 5SM, the last party to appear on the political stage, while for the more established parties (in bolds in the table) they are sensibly lower. Table 2 and 3 about here

3. In-group and out-group bias

One of the tenets of social identity theory is that, according to the minimal group paradigm (Tajfel, 1982), social identification can be expressed even in the absence of a particularly strong basis of group identification, since identification/self-categorisation is a motivational need for some personal positive distinction. As a consequence, social identification with a group would lead to a biased perception of in-group and out-group objects (Greene, 1999). Likewise a stronger partisan social identity should lead to greater differentiation between the parties (making defection from one’s preferred party less likely) (Greene, 2004). We would then expect that Party Social Identity will carry a greater distinctiveness between in-party and out-party evaluations than Closeness to Party. Of course given that both measures are properties of the same individuals, we are looking for variation of strength in bias rather than absence/presence of derogation of the out-party. We run our tests on leaders evaluations and on the probability to vote for the parties, with the expectation that PSI will accentuate distance to out-party leaders and diminish the probability to vote for out-parties than CTP.

2 Question format reads: ‘Is there a party you feel closer with respect to other parties? Which party is this? ‘ . Those responding ‘No/Don’t Know’ are further probed: ‘Do you feel yourself just a little closer to one of the parties than the others? Which party is this?’. Then those providing a party name are asked: ‘Do you feel to be just a sympathizer, fairly close or very close to this party?’. 4 Table 4 shows the average political leaders’ scores by CTP and PSI for selected parties. Our expectations are clearly not supported: the in-party evaluations are obviously high but with no difference between CTP and PSI. Likewise, the average out-party leaders’ score (in the last column of the table) does not change according to partisan identification or partisan attitude. On the other hand, some support for the hypothesis can be found by looking at the correlation with the probability to vote (PTV) for in and out parties, observed in the same first panel wave (Table 5). The correlation between PTV for the in-party is stronger with PSI rather than with CTP, with the exception of LEF party and Northern League. Also the distances between the in-party and the others appear larger for PSI than for CTP. A multi-dimensional scaling of the correlations between scores of partisanship and PTVs reveals average values – measured as Euclidean distances; last column of Table 5) slightly greater for Party Social identity, with the exception of Italy of Values’ partisans. So identitarian partisanship does indeed appear to enhance group (party) differentiation to a greater extent than attitudinal partisanship. But to what extent is this stable overtime? In order to ascertain this we rely on the different survey waves to see whether the PTVs for the in-party exhibit the expected pattern (leaving aside the PTVs for out-parties at the moment). Findings (Table 6) are off-putting, since PSI does not systematically overtake CTP. This happens with partisans of People of Freedom, Northern League and 5Star Movement, for whom social identity correlates higher with their propensity to vote their party overtime. On the other hand, the two measures do no distinguish each other for Democratic Party partisans, while for LEF partisans closeness to party is a better prediction of their willingness to support their party than party social identity.

Table 4, 5 and 6 here

4. Partisanship: social identity or attitude?

The ambivalence of these findings suggests to look somewhat deeper into the meaning/ content of the two measures of partisanship. Recall that our starting assumption was that Closeness to Party is an indicator of partisanship as an attitude, opposed to a party allegiance based on a Social Identity partisanship. A way to assess whether such assumption is empirically grounded is to inquiry into their correlates, that is employing appropriate indicators tapping respectively an identity and an attitude model as determinants of partisanship (see Garzia, 2014, for a similar exercise). The identity model is comprised of social structure indicators (social class, religiousness, membership in secondary associations) while the attitude model relies on people’s evaluations of partisan objects: ideological radicalism (i.e., the distance between voters’ self-location on the Left-Right continuum and the mid-point of the scale - 5), economic evaluations, leaders’ scores. Control covariates include age, education, political interest. Our expectations are that the identity model would explain Party Social Identity but not (or would fit less) Closeness to party while, conversely, the attitude model would explain Closeness to Party but not (or would fit less) Party Social Identity. Both dependent variables have a 0-3 range where 0 indicates no partisanship and 1 to 3 increasing strength of CTP and PSI. As it can be seen in Table 7 results show mixed findings. Most variables of the identity model correlate significantly (social class, memberships in unions and in professional associations) with PSI, while only membership in unions is a significant predictor of Closeness To Party. We could then infer that Party Social Identity does carry a social allegiance component. At the same time, we must notice that the fit of the identity model is greater for Closeness To Party (Adj. R2 = .14) than for PSI (Adj. R2 = .09). On the other hand the attitude model does not discriminates effectively between social identity and attitudinal partisanship: the same variables (ideological radicalism and leaders’ evaluations) are significant predictors of both

5 measures of partisanship although party performance evaluations (measured by the retrospective sociotropic evaluation) is, as expected, a significant predictor of attitudinal partisanship but not of social party identity. Depending on whether one sees half empty or full the glass, this analysis hints to a more or less differentiated structure behind party attitude and party identity. Party social identity – which we must recall is devoid of any political or social content reflecting only the self- perceived intensity/embeddedness of the subjective link between voters and in-parties – are associated to social class and some joining propensity, although the latter is washed out in a composite model which includes some political evaluations and leaders’ images, the assumed features of a pure attitudinal partisanship. On the other hand the composite model of attitudinal partisanship retains all the expected determinants, adding however also union memberships, hypothetically linked to social identity. On balance, and taking into account that the two partisanship measures are inter-correlated, we think that our initial hypothesis on the different nature of the two partisanships has not been rejected, although further research needs to be carried out to better distinguish between them and to inquiry into the political and social characteristics of the voters who hold them.

Table 7 about here

5. So what? Partisanship and the 2013 swing-vote

The next and final step of this exploratory analysis is to ask whether partisanship – attitudinal and identitarian – played a distinctive role in the 2013 legislative elections, when 4 out of 10 voters switched their choice. Table 8 shows estimates of such a switch according to the declared partisanship in 2011, where figure in bold represent the share of partisans who confirmed their vote to the their in-parties (or their heirs, alone or in coalition with others). Larger and mainstream parties show higher level of loyalty vis a vis smaller parties although also their level of stand-patters is quite low (i.e., only 47% of Berlusconi’s PoF confirmed their vote). The new 5SM was then able to acquire votes from all out-party partisans. Naturally, we expect that partisanship did exert a role in determining the vote choice, but we want to compare the differential impact of attitudinal versus identitarian allegiances. In order to do so we estimate, for the major parties, a logistic baseline model (including standard determinants of vote choice) and compute then the R2 change adding alternatively the Closeness To Party and Party Social Identity variables. Table 9 reports the findings, distinguishing between all voters and in-party partisan voters only.

The table reads as it follows. The first row shows in column (1) the explained variance (35%) of a model predicting the likelihood of a vote for the Left, Ecology and Freedom across whole sample. Adding Closeness to Party (col. 2) raises the explained variance to 44%, with a change of + 9 percentage points (col. 3). Adding alternatively to the baseline model the Party Social Identity variable the explained variance goes up to 42% (col. 4) with a change of + 7 percentage points (col. 5). The differential impact of adding identitarian partisanship rather than attitudinal partisanship is then computed as the difference between the two added variances (Col. 6). Closeness to Party performs slightly better than Party Social Identity, explaining 2 points percentage more than the former. In row 2 the same is replicated limiting the analysis to only the 2011 partisans of Left, Ecology and Freedom.

A perusal of the table reveals then the differences in added explained variance of the alternative measures of partisanship to be rather small. The two measures perform in a comparable way. However, it hints also to the fact that party type does exert some impact, as

6 it has been already observed: partisan social identity performs slightly better in the case of the Democratic Party and of the Northern League, both parties still anchored to a distinctive ideological orientation, while the opposite is true for Berlusconi’s People of Freedom, a populist catch-all party with less ideological base, as Figure 1 and 2 show graphing the likelihood of a vote for PoF and DP according to the two measures of partisanship.

6. Tentative conclusive remarks

This paper reports rather inconclusive findings, maybe in line with the current critique of publication bias in favour of only statistically significant and substantial findings. The research question we have investigated is the nature – attitudinal or identitarian – of current partisanship. The two measures we tested in the ITANES 2001-13 panel study show a slight greater intensity of the Party Social Identity scale than the Closeness To Party scale. The former does not however elicit a greater capability to differentiate between in and out party if leaders’ likeability are assessed – as social identity theory assumes - while it does enhance groups differentiation if PTVs are examined. Nonetheless overtime – across five panel waves – the strength of association between PSI and in-party PTV is rather tenuous. The analysis of the determinants of identitarian and attitudinal partisanship – to inquiry into the nature of partisanship – hints to an actual difference among the two, with the former loosely connected to social structure and the latter to ideology and leaders’ evaluation. However, when both are employed to model the 2013 vote choice their impact is not clearly discernible.

7 References

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9 Table 1. Statements in the Party Social Identity Scales (10 and 4 items)

Agree Neither/n Disagree DK N. or When someone criticises (party name), it feels 22.4 35.1 39.9 2.6 1281 like a personal insult * I do not act like the typical person of (party) 22.8 41.5 28.5 7.3 1281 I m very interested in what others think about 52.1 31.8 13.7 2.4 1281 (party) The limitations associated with (party) apply 17.4 33.7 42.3 6.5 1281 to me also When I talk about (party), I usually say ‘we’ 34.0 25.6 35.6 4.8 1281 rather than ‘they’ * I have a number of qualities typical of 59.9 24.4 9.8 5.9 1281 members of (party) The (party)’s successes are my successes * 49.0 33.3 14.8 3.1 1281 If a story in the media criticized the (party), I 19.8 37.2 39.9 3.1 1281 would feel embarrassed When someone praises (party), it feels like a 29.4 42.0 25.4 3.2 1281 personal compliment * I act like a person of (party) to a great extent 8.6 42.2 14.8 5.5 1281 * Statements composing 4 item Party Social Identity scale Notes: Cronbach’s Alpha 10 item scale: .664 (N. = 1034) Cronbach’s Alpha 4 item scale: .721 (N. = 1171) Person’s correlation PSI_10 Items/PSI_4 Item: R = .912 (P. = .000)

10 Table 2. Mean values of Closeness to Party and Party Social identity Scale (range 1-3; N in parentheses)

Closeness to Party Party Social Identity Left, Ecology, Freedom 1.67 (195) 1.97 (182) Communist Party 1.68 (19) 2.20 (20) Democratic Party* 1.75 (230) 2.14 (217) Left Democrats* 1.62 (16) 1.83 (15) Alliance for Italy/Daisy* 1.67 (6) 2.35 (5) Green Party 1.28 (7) 1.91 (6) Socialist Party 2.0 (5) 2.25 (4) Italy of Values 1.65 (94) 2.0 (87) Union of Centre 1.54 (59) 1.86 (51) People of Freedom+ 1.89 (233) 2.14 (218) Go Italy+ 1.67 (46) 2.12 (40) National Alliance+ 1.62 (24) 1.90 (21) Future and Freedom for Italy§ 1.35 (71) 1.8 (61) The Right 1.75 (37) 2.17 (32) Northern League 1.87 (135) 2.08 (131) Five Star Movement 1.79 (62) 2.0 (56) Radical Party 1.6 (10) 2.01 (10) All 1.7 (1263) 2.05 (1171)

* Left Democrats and Alliance for Italy/Daisy joined the Democratic Party in 2007 + Go Italy and National Alliance joined People of Freedom in 2009 § Future and Freedom for Italy is a splinter group which left People of Freedom in 2010

11 Table 3. Correlation between Closeness to Party and Party Social identity Scale (First wave, Spring 2011) Panel A: Correlations Pearson’ R Significance N level Left, Ecology, Freedom .383 .000 182 Communist Party .505 .027 19 Democratic Party* .374 .000 215 Left Democrats* .331 .228 15 Alliance for Italy/Daisy* .710 .196 5 Green Party .908 .012 6 Socialist Party .000 4 Italy of Values .331 .002 87 Union of Centre .520 .000 50 People of Freedom+ .477 .000 216 Go Italy+ .475 .002 40 National Alliance+ .397 .083 20 Future and Freedom for Italy§ .495 .000 61 The Right .377 .031 32 Northern League .613 .000 128 Five Star Movement .598 .000 56 Radical Party .565 .089 10 All .460 .000 1171

* Left Democrats and Alliance for Italy/Daisy joined the Democratic Party in 2007 + Go Italy and National Alliance joined People of Freedom in 2009 § Future and Freedom for Italy is a splinter group which left People of Freedom in 2010

Panel B: Average value of Party Social identity (1-3 scale) according to Closeness to Party

Party Social Identity Mean N Std. Deviation Sympathizer 1.79 507 .53 Fairly close 2.16 448 .53 Very close 2.50 205 .44 Total 2.05 1160 .59

12 Table 4. Leaders evaluation (0-10 scale) according to Closeness to Party and Party Social Identity (recoded in low, intermediate, high)

Vendola Bersani Di Pietro Casini – Berlusconi Fini – Bossi – Out- party - – - Italy of Union of - People of Future Northern average Left, Democra Values Centre Freedom and League leaders’ Ecology, tic Party Freedom score Freedom for Italy Left, Ecology, Freedom - Very close 9.2 7.0 6.0 4.7 0.3 2.1 1.3 3.6 - High PSI 9.3 6.4 6.2 4.4 0.9 2.0 1.7 3.6 Democratic Party - Very close 7.2 8.1 6.0 4.9 1.0 5.0 1.8 4.3 - High PSI 7.3 8.0 6.0 4.8 0.5 4.4 1.1 4.0 Italy of Values - Very close 6.9 7.1 9.1 4.3 1.1 3.5 1.7 4.1 - High PSI 7.3 6.2 8.7 3.5 0.6 2.6 0.4 4.2 People of Freedom - Very close 2.1 1.9 0.6 3.1 8.8 1.0 7.1 2.6 - High PSI 2.6 2.1 0.9 3.5 8.6 2.2 6.9 3.0 Northern League - Very close 1.0 1.4 0.7 1.2 6.4 0.6 9.0 1.9 - High PSI 1.0 1.5 0.8 1.9 6.0 0.6 9.0 2.0

13 Table 5. Correlation (Pearson’ R) between Closeness To Party and Party Social Identity with the Probability to vote for given parties (first wave, Spring 2011)

Left, Democ Italy of People Future Northern 5 Star Average Ecology, ratic Values Union of of and League Moveme Euclidean Freedom Party Centre Freedo Freedo nt distance m m for Italy Left, Ecology, Freedom - Closeness .23** .11 .10 -.03 -.00 -.08 -.03 .08 1.1 - PSI .16* .03 .10 .02 -.10 -.02 -.02 .08 1.3 Democratic Party - Closeness .04 .19** .11 -.04 .07 -.12 -.07 -.03 0.27 - PSI .16* .23** .11 -.02 .01 -.00 -.13 .08 0.77 Italy of Values - Closeness .04 .15 .19 .12 .09 .00 .19 .29* 0.80 - PSI -.01 .05 .26* .13 .07 .03 .05 .03 0.73 People of Freedom - Closeness -.14* -.15* -.12 -.04 .36** -.09 .18** -.16* 0.46 - PSI -.23** -.21** -.19** .01 .38** -.08 .14* -.20** 0.61 Northern League - Closeness -.23** -.17 -.16 -.22* .09 -.21* .53** -.14 0.46 - PSI -.11 -.09 .01 -.15 .05 -.10 .44** .09 0.52 5 Star Movement - Closeness .01 .12 .21 -.10 -.00 .02 .12 .13 0.61 - PSI .27* .14 .26 -.11 .15 .00 .02 .18 0.83

* p < .05 ** p <.01

14 Table 6. Correlation (Pearson’ R) between Closeness To Party and Party Social identity (measured in the first wave) with the Probability to Vote for the in-party by wave.

Wave1 Wave2 Wave3 Wave4 Wave5 Left, Ecology, Freedom - Closeness .23** .22** .24** .18* .32** - Party Social Identity .16* .14 .14 .15 .10 Democratic Party - Closeness .23** .24** .31** .21** .25** - Party Social Identity .19** .29** .32** .20* .23** Italy of Values - Closeness .19 .14 .15 .18 .17/.04§ - Party Social Identity .26* .31* .27* .23* .02/.13§ Union of Centre - Closeness .08 .13 .17 .17 .27 - Party Social Identity .26* .16 .18 -.13 .12 People of Freedom+ - Closeness .36** .23** .29** .30** .42** - Party Social Identity .38** .34** .31** .38** .42** Future and Freedom for Italy§ - Closeness .29* .32* .17 .00 .12 - Party Social Identity .24 .22 .08 -.15 -.03 The Right - Closeness -.26 .34 .02 .34 -.16 - Party Social Identity .08 .23 .21 .35 .56* Northern League - Closeness .53** .51** .42** .42** .32** - Party Social Identity .44** .28** .25* .40** .34** Five Star Movement - Closeness .18 .21 .02 .19 .11 - Party Social Identity .13 .30* .21 .36* .33*

§ At the 2013 elections Italy of Values split, joining new list: Radical Left and Democratic Centre. The correlations shown are, respectively, to the former and latter lists.

15 Table 7. Determinants of Closeness to Party and Party Social Identity (OLS estimates)

Closeness Party Social to Party identity b s.e. b s.e. Identity Model

Social Class .01 .03 .06* .03 Religiousness -.05 .05 -0.2 .05 Membership in Unions .20* .10 .18* .11 Membership professional groups .11 .10 .17* .10 Membership religious groups .12 .11 .11 .12 Constant .01 .18 Ad. R2 .14 .09 N 643 643

Attitude Model

Left-Right extreme .10*** .01 .10*** .01 Economic assessment -.11** .04 -.02 .05 Berlusconi evaluation .03*** .00 .03*** .00 Bersani evaluation .03*** .00 .04*** .01 Constant .22 .24 Ad. R2 .16 .11 N 1291 1291

Composite Model

Social Class .01 .03 .06* .04 Religiousness -.01 .04 .03 .05 Membership in Unions .19* .10 .14 .10 Membership professional groups .06 .09 .09 .10 Membership religious groups .10 .11 .11 .12 Left-Right extreme .08*** .02 .10*** .02 Economic assessment -.11* .06 -.04 .07 Berlusconi evaluation .05*** .01 .04*** .01 Bersani evaluation .04*** .01 .03*** .01 Constant -.23 .81 Ad. R2 .17 .09 N 580 580

Note: Age, education and interest in politics coefficients not shown * p < .10; ** p <.05; *** p <.01

16 Table 8. 2011 partisanship and 2013 vote choice

Declared partisanship in panel first wave, Spring 2011 Party Com Left, Democratic Left Italy of Union People of Go National Future The Northern Five Star All voted in muni Ecology, Party* Democrats* Values of Freedom Italy+ Alliance+ and Right League Movement 2013 st Freedom Centre + Freedom Party for Italy§ Ext. Left 60.0 4.7 - - 10.0 - - - - 2.8 - - 10.0 2.9 LEF 30.0 38.3 4.1 25.0 10.0 3.7 0.8 - 6.7 - - 3.3 8.5 DP - 28.3 79.7 62.5 30.0 7.4 5.9 - 6.7 16.7 7.1 1.5 3.3 27.2 CC - 5.4 5.4 - 5.0 29.6 7.6 - 26.7 19.4 - 9.2 3.3 7.4 PoF - 0.9 - - - 18.5 47.2 72.7 6.7 - 21.4 7.7 - 14.6 Ex. Right - - - - - 7.4 10.2 9.1 - 2.8 28.6 3.1 - 3.3 NL - - 0.7 - 1.7 - - - 6.7 - - 36.9 - 3.7 5SM 10.0 29.9 6.8 12.5 43.3 29.6 47.2 13.6 40.0 47.2 21.4 29.2 73.3 26.8 Other - 14.3 - - 4.5 6.7 21.4 12.3 6.7 5.6 All 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 N 10 107 148 8 60 27 119 22 22 36 14 65 30 731

* Left Democrats joined the Democratic Party in 2007 + Go Italy and National Alliance joined People of Freedom in 2009 § Future and Freedom for Italy is a splinter group which left People of Freedom in 2010

17

Table 9. R2 (Nagelkerke) change by adding alternatively Closeness to Party and Party Social Identity (measured in wave 1) to a baseline model predicting party vote (wave 5). Logistic regressions 2013 Party Vote R2 R2 adding Δ R2 R2 adding Δ R2 Δ R2 N. (Wave 5) Baseline Closeness To change Party change change Party Social PSI - (1) (2) (3=|2-1|) Identity (5=|4-1|) CTP (7) (4) (6=5-3) Left, Ecology, Freedom (All) .35 .44 .09 .42 .07 -. 02 618 Left, Ecology, Freedom (Wave1 partisans only) .45 .46 .01 .46 .01 .00 87

Democratic Party (All) .28 .44 .16 .45 .17 .01 618 Democratic Party (Wave1 partisans only) .19 .20 .01 .24 .05 .04 113

People of Freedom (All) .34 .49 .15 .48 .14 -.01 618 People of Freedom (Wave1 partisans only) .28 .39 .11 .34 .06 -.05 99

Northern League (All) .19 ,48 .29 .49 .30 .01 618 Northern League (Wave1 partisans only) .15 .28 .13 .30 .15 .02 56

5 Star Movement (All) .10 .14 .04 .14 .04 .00 618 5 Star Movement (Wave1 partisans only) .50 .61 .11 .60 .11 .00 25

The baseline model includes: age, education, gender, social class, Left_Right self-placement all measured in Wave 1, plus government approval and retrospective evaluation of the national economy measured in Wave 4.

18 Figure 1. Predicting the likelihood of vote for the People of Freedom according to partisanhip measures (all other varibales at mean values)

People of Freddom _ Predictive Margins with 95% CIs .6 .4 Pr(Vot13_Pdl) .2 0 0 1 2 3 Party Social Identity

People of Freedom _ Predictive Margins with 95% CIs .8 .6 .4 Pr(Vot13_Pdl) .2 0 0 1 2 3 Closeness to party

19 Figure 2. Predicting the likelihood of vote for the Democratic Party according to partisanhip measures (all other varibales at mean values)

Democratic Party _Predictive Margins with 95% CIs .8 .6 .4 Pr(Vot13_Pd) .2 0 0 1 2 3 Party Social identity

Democratic Party _ Predictive Margins with 95% CIs 1 .8 .6 Pr(Vot13_Pd) .4 .2

0 1 2 3 Closenss to Party

20