Issue 13, Volume 1 June 2018 Special Issue: Who’s the winner? An analysis of the 2018 Italian general election Stefania Panebianco, Francesco Zucchini An introductory note …….……….…..……………….…………………………………….………………………..…….…………………….. i * Vincenzo Emanuele, Special Issue Guest Editor ‘Who’s the winner? An analysis of the 2018 Italian general election’ ………………………..…..... 1 Alessandro Chiaramonte, Roberto D’Alimonte The new Italian electoral system and its effects on strategic coordination and disproportionality .…………………………….……………….…….….…….…. 8 Andrea Pedrazzani, Luca Pinto, Paolo Segatti Italian candidates under the Rosato law ......................................................................….. 19 Cristopher Cepernich, Roberta Bracciale Hybrid 2018 campaigning: Italian political leaders and parties social media habits .....….. 36 Giuliano Bobba, Franca Roncarolo The likeability of populism on social media in the 2018 Italian general election ................ 51 Aldo Paparo Challenger’s delight: The results of the 2018 Italian general election .…………….................. 63 Eugenio Salvati, Michelangelo Vercesi Party Organizations and Legislative Turnover ……………………………………....…....................... 82 © 2018, Società Italiana di Scienza Politica Italian Political Science ISSN: 2420-8434 Volume 13, Issue 1 List of Contributors Giuliano Bobba, University of Turin Roberta Bracciale, University of Pisa Cristopher Cepernich, University of Turin Alessandro Chiaramonte, University of Florence Roberto D’Alimonte, LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome Vincenzo Emanuele, LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome Stefania Panebianco, University of Catania Aldo Paparo, LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome Andrea Pedrazzani, University of Bologna Luca Pinto, University of Bologna Franca Roncarolo, University of Turin Eugenio Salvati, University of Pavia Paolo Segatti, University of Milan Michelangelo Vercesi, Leuphana University of Lüneburg Francesco Zucchini, University of Milan Italian Political Science, VOLUME 13 ISSUE 1, MAY 2018 An introductory note From former IPS Co-Editors: Stefania Panebianco UNIVERSITY OF CATANIA Francesco Zucchini UNIVERSITY OF MILAN t is with great pleasure that we welcome the new format of Italian Political Science (IPS) as an open-access, peer-reviewed, quarterly journal. It is, in some way, the jour- I nal's third life. IPS was launched in 2007 by Maurizio Cotta with Giliberto Capano as a professional digital journal whose mission was to foster debate on problems relating to the develop- ment of Political Science in Italy and abroad. For the first time, the Italian political science community had access to an electronic tool, entirely written in English, to en- gage in the international debate. In 2013, IPS was relaunched with a new editorial team, a new website, a new format and a section including book reviews. As a professional journal, IPS was faced with such challenges as the internationalization of teaching (first and foremost of PhD pro- grammes), the evaluation of research, and the reform of academic programmes. While the SISP journal ‘Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica’ was changing into ‘Italian Political Science Review’, IPS was conceived primarily as a forum to debate on traditional and emerging research issues or new teaching instruments. A number of interviews with the founding fathers of Political Science in Italy and with Italian political scientists in rele- vant international roles aimed at fostering the circulation of ideas, in combination with short but more structured articles. Special issues were devoted to specific new or ne- glected sub-fields of the discipline. IPS has now turned into an open-access scientific journal with a broader scope. This is a new, exciting adventure. By fostering the understanding of political phenomena through the lenses of Political Science, IPS opens to a wider politically-minded public without losing scientific rigour. This new phase, aimed at further strengthening Italian Political Science in Italy and abroad, kicks off with a timely first issue focusing on the 2018 Italian general election. We believe that such a strong beginning will be upheld in forthcoming issues. Good luck to the co-editors and to the new editorial team. © 2018 Italian Political Science. ISSN 2420-8434. Volume 13, Issue 1, pp. i. Italian Political Science, VOLUME 13 ISSUE 1, MAY 2018 Introduction to the Special Issue: ‘Who’s the winner? An analysis of the 2018 Italian general election’ Vincenzo Emanuele LUISS GUIDO CARLI UNIVERSITY, ROME ITALIAN CENTRE FOR ELECTORAL STUDIES (CISE) Guest Special Issue Editor An unprecedented election ive years after the ‘electoral earthquake’ of 2013 (Chiaramonte and De Sio 2014), when the rise of the largest genuinely new political party that had ever appeared Fin Western Europe led to the collapse of the bipolar pattern of party competition that had characterized the so-called Second Republic (Bordignon and Ceccarini 2013; Maggini 2014; Chiaramonte and Emanuele 2014), Italian politics has been shaken by an- other turbulent election. Indeed, the election held on 4 March of 2018, while showing a substantial continuity in the tripolar competition pattern that emerged in 2013, has pro- duced a radical shift in the balance of power among the three poles of the Italian party system, thus leading to at least five unprecedented results. First, the centre-right coalition came first with 37% of the vote share but falling short of an overall majority by 50 seats. Here, Berlusconi’s party is no longer the dominant ac- tor of the coalition, as the new populist and nationalist Lega (The League) led by Matteo Salvini (Tarchi 2018) received more than 17% of the vote share, thus managing to over- take Forza Italia (Go Italy, FI) for the first time since 1994. Second, the incumbent Partito Democratico (Democratic Party, PD) fell to 18.7%, its lowest result ever, and the centre-left coalition came only third with less than 23% of the votes. From a longitudinal perspective, the election was a disaster for the Italian left: if we consider the entire left bloc, including also the two leftist lists of Liberi e Uguali (Free and Equal, LeU) and Potere al Popolo (Power to the People), it received just 27.4% and less than 9 million votes, the lowest result since the foundation of the Republic. Just to make a comparison, in 2006, this bloc was twice as large with 19 million votes. More gen- erally, today the Italian Left is the second weakest in Western Europe, just after France (Emanuele 2018a). Third, under the new leadership of Luigi Di Maio, the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement, M5S) became the most voted party with 32.7% of the vote share, thus managing to achieve a sort of record. Indeed, all the previous cases of a successful electoral debut – such as Forza Italia in 1994, the Spanish Podemos in 2015, the Portu- guese Democratic Renewal Party in 1985 or the Dutch Pim Fortuyn List in 2002 – suffered an electoral setback in the subsequent election (Emanuele and Marino © 2018 Italian Political Science. ISSN 2420-8434. Volume 13, Issue 1, pp. 1–7. Contact Author: Vincenzo Emanuele, LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome. E-mail address: [email protected] EMANUELE, Introduction to the Special Issue 2018). In this regard, not only did the Five Star Movement manage not to lose votes, but it also increased its vote share by almost seven percentage points compared to 2013. Deeply intertwined with the previous points are the fourth and fifth unprecedented events that resulted from the 2018 election. In recent years, scholars working on elec- toral dynamics in the European context have started to consider the ‘Great Recession’ that hit Europe after 2008 as a sort of new ‘critical juncture for the structuration of na- tional party systems’ (Kriesi 2017; Hooghe and Marks 2018). Specifically, the impact of the economic and sovereign debt crisis systematically led to the defeat of incumbent gov- ernments led by mainstream parties (Hérnandez and Kriesi 2016); the rise of new anti- establishment challengers (Bosco and Verney 2012; Emanuele and Chiaramonte 2016; Hobolt and Tilley 2016); increasing electoral instability with patterns of party system de- institutionalization (Chiaramonte and Emanuele 2017; 2018) and, especially in South- ern Europe, high risks of government instability (Bosco and Verney 2016). Not only does the Italian election of 2018 fit perfectly into this path, but it is also the first time that anti- establishment forces (i.e., M5S and Lega), considered together, have won the overall ma- jority of votes and seats. Moreover, and this brings us to the last point which is an absolute innovation in comparative perspective, after about three months of complex negotiations, the M5S and the Lega have eventually come to an agreement and have formed a new coalition government, thus putting the traditional mainstream parties (i.e., the PD and Forza Italia) out of power. Such an outcome will inevitably produce a deep change in the Italian political system, opening a transition whose final point of ar- rival is still difficult to predict. Why this Special Issue For all the above-mentioned reasons the Italian election of 2018 is a remarkable novelty not only for our national politics but also in comparative perspective. A usual and, in some way, unavoidable problem of the scientific community is that its production (books, journal articles) requires a great deal of time and the findings they deliver scarcely tap into the ongoing political debate. Consequently, the latter is dominated