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,