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The Regionalization of Regional Elections in Italy 1 The regionalization of regional elections in Italy 1 Emanuele Massetti, Gediz University and Giulia Sandri, University of Oxford Abstract: The impact of the institutional regionalization process on regional party systems in Italy is rather controversial in the literature (Chiaramonte and Di Virgilio, 2000; Loughlin and Bolgherini, 2006; Baldi, 2006; Tronconi, 2009). Since the first regional elections held in 1970, regional party systems have been traditionally built, with only few exceptions, upon the format and the competition structures present at national level (De Mucci, 1987; Grilli di Cortona, 2002; Caciagli, 1988 and 2006) Recent studies have come to apparently contradicting conclusions: on the one hand, they point to the emergence of a pattern of progressive ‘denationalization’ or ‘territorialization’ (as opposed to ‘nationalization’, Caramani 2002) of regional party politics, regional political competition and voting behaviour in regional elections (Baldini and Vassallo, 2000; Tronconi, 2005; Wilson, 2006; Tronconi and Roux, 2009); and, on the other hand, they highlight the presence of more evident signs second-order electoral behavior (Tronconi and Roux, 2009). This paper combines multi-level electoral and party system analysis, thus providing a comprehensive overview of the level and causes of ‘regionalization’ of politics in Italy since 1970. The multi-level electoral analysis makes use of three indexes for measuring dissimilarity (between national and regional voting) proposed by Schakel (2011) and adopts the analytical framework developed in Schakel and Dandoy (Schakel and Dandoy, 2013 forthcoming). Based on this model and using an original dataset, we present and discuss the sociological, institutional and political determinants of multi-level dissimilarity in voting. The factors considered are: the strength of the centre-periphery cleavage, the level of regional authority, the electoral cycles, the voting systems, the level of responsibility of parties (government/opposition), and the structure of competition in multi-level party systems. The developed quantitative models allow comparing individual regional cases across time and space and verify the competing hypotheses of regionalization or nationalization of regional voting in Italy. Paper presented at the XXVI Convegno SISP 2012, Roma, 13-15 September 2012 Panel 9.3 Elezioni, territorio e de-nazionalizzazione del voto Chairs: Alessandro Chiaramonte; Vincenzo Emanuele 1 A modified version of this paper is going to be published as a chapter in the edited book ‘Regional and National Elections in Western Europe. Territoriality of the Vote in Thirteen Countries’, by R. Dandoy and A. Schakel (eds), Palgrave, Basingstoke, (forthcoming 2013) (http://www.arjanschakel.nl/). 1 1. Introduction Since the mid-1990s, a number of relevant political and institutional reforms have been carried out in Italy in the sense of a stronger decentralization of power towards subnational units. While regional autonomy has been gradually growing in Italy in the last two decades, the interpretations of the evolution in regional politics rather differ in the literature. According to several authors, before the 1992-1994 political turmoil, the consequent collapse of the main parties and the regime shifts that ensued, 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. Given the political and institutional changes carried out in the 1990s, we could logically expect that that regional politics would gain greater autonomy, show an increased diversification among regions and thus make the regional vote less dependent on national dynamics. Nevertheless, the hypothesis that regional elections started to follow a generalized pattern of ‘second order’ electoral behavior precisely during the Second Republic has also been developed (Chiaramonte and Di Virgilio, 2000; Loughlin and Bolgherini, 2003; Tronconi and Roux, 2009). Two main questions then need to be answered: first, at empirical level, to what extent can we find evidence that regional politics has become enfranchised from national dynamics? Secondly, does second-order election theory provide a satisfactory analytical framework to investigate changes in the level of ‘second orderness’ of regional elections? 2. Indicators and Determinants of ‘second orderness’ in Italy The basic way to study the level of ‘nationalization’ (or ‘regionalization’) of regional elections is to calculate dissimilarity between electoral results at national and regional level. Here, we follow Schakel (2011) where he distinguished between three indicators capturing three different dissimilarities. We calculate the incongruence between the results of a national election in the whole country (NN) and the results of a regional election in each region (RR). This index (NN- NR) represents, so to speak, the difference between the national and regional party systems. This is determined by two sources of incongruence: first, the different preferences of the regional electorate vis-à-vis the national electorate even in the same national election (NN-NR); and 2 secondly, vote swings within the same regional electorate between a national and regional elections (NR-RR). 2 The analysis of these three indexes allows us to evaluate not only the level of dissimilarity but also the source. Indeed, the basic thesis of the second order election model is that all non- national elections, which obviously include regional ones, are subordinate to first order national elections (Reif and Schmitt, 1980). The main empirical argument is that turnout tends to be lower in second order elections, and voters who do turnout tend to support opposition or small/fringe parties at the expenses of government parties. The symptoms of ‘second orderness’ must, therefore, be searched through a deeper analysis which includes turnout difference, government/opposition parties’ performances, government incongruence between national and regional level, and vote shares for non-state-wide (i.e. regional) parties. Four sets of factors have been identified in the literature as shaping the relationship between regional and national elections: the strength of the centre-periphery cleavage, the level of regional authority, the electoral cycles and the voting systems. To this list, we add a country specific factor, which is also linked to the national electoral system but whose scope is wider and its nature more political. We refer to the passage from the so called First Republic to the so called Second Republic in 1993, which consisted primarily in the collapse and disappearance of the historical parties that dominated Italian politics since 1946, a substantive change of the voting system (which will be changed again in 2005), and a slow re-building of a new party system characterized by an increased saliency of the territorial dimension of party competition (Massetti and Toubeau, forthcoming 2013); the structuring of political offer around both individual parties and coalitions of parties; and by the emergence of a bipolar dynamics of competition. We argue, also on the basis of recent studies (Tronconi and Roux, 2009), that the latter characteristic might have and important influence in the way in which a ‘second order’ perception of regional elections is translated into actual voting behaviour. More precisely, since 2 For a detailed explanation on the index calculation, see Schakel, 2011. The data used for calculating the three indexes have been collected by Arjan Schakel (Maastricht University) and by the authors. In order to calculate the three dissimilarity indexes we adapted the Lee index, usually used for measuring the dissimilarity of the vote across different government levels (Hearl, Budge and Pearson, 1996; Pallares and Keating, 2003; Jeffery and Hough, 2003, 2009; Skrinis and Teperoglou, 2008; Tronconi and Roux, 2009; Floridia, 2010). The dissimilarity index is calculated by taking the sum of the absolute differences between regional and national vote shares for each party and subsequently dividing the sum by two, in order to avoid double counting (See Schakel and Dandoy, 2013: 13). The n =1 − formula is given by: Dissimilarity∑ | XiN X iR | where XiN is the percentage of the vote won by 2 i=1 party i in a given national election N, and X iR is the percentage of the vote won by party i in the closest (in time) regional election R to the national election in question. Scores may vary from complete congruence/similarity (0%) to complete incongruence/dissimilarity (100%). Therefore, in order to calculate the three different versions of the adapted Lee index, we plugged into the index the following shares of votes: - General electoral results at state-wide level, per party and per election (NN) - The vote share in a particular region for the general election, per party and per general election (NR) - The vote share in a particular region for the regional election, per party and per regional election (RR) 3 second order election theory has rested primarily on the assumption of a bipolar (or even two- party) competition, we think that a growing manifestation of second order symptoms in the Second Republic might not necessarily be the consequence of decreased importance
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