2018 APSA Conference: ITALY AT THE CROSSROADS

Don’t miss the CONGRIPS Panel at 2018 APSA conference!!!

ITALY AT THE CROSSROADS

Sat, September 1, 12:00 to 1:30pm, Sheraton, Beacon E

Chair: Matthew Edward Bergman, University of California, San Diego

Discussant: Amie Kreppel, University of Florida

From the Movement to the Party. The «Five Star» Evolution by Luigi Ceccarini (University of Urbino) and Fabio Bordignon (University of Urbino)

Italians and Their Democracy. How the Economic Crisis Affected Voters’ Attitudes by Fulvio Venturino (University of Cagliari)

Useless Approvals. The Italian Bicameralism and Its Decisional Capacity by Andrea Pedrazzani (University of Bologna) and Francesco Zucchini (University of Milan)

Collusion Between Mainstream Parties and Anti-Establishment Parties’ Success by Filippo Tronconi (University of Bologna) and Marco Valbruzzi (University of Bologna)

From the Movement to the Party. The «Five Star» Evolution by Luigi Ceccarini (University of Urbino) and Fabio Bordignon (University of Urbino)

2017 and 2018 are important years in the short history of the Italian Five star Movement (M5s), both from the symbolic and the substantial point of view. This gives the opportunity to think over the Five star Movement and to take stock of this political actor which challenges the Italian representative democracy. In fact, direct democracy is enhanced and citizens’ discontent and the anti-political sentiment fed by M5s’ rhetoric. The key question to respond through the paper shall be as follows: what is, nowadays, this peculiar political actor within the national political system and in the frame of the European polity?
In this regard, time is an important variable: local Elections were held on 2017 and General Elections are scheduled for the 4th of March 2018. Those are two important stages in the recent trajectory of the Five star Movement.
Municipal Elections, held in June 2017, marked the end of the first cycle of the M5s as a governing actor at local level, started in 2012 with success in the Northern city of Parma. But they also rule important and big cities like Rome and Turin since 2016. Together with the results gained at the Regional elections in Sicily, in November 2017, they showed the on-going consolidation of this movement-party in the politics at local level, but also its enduring problems in both on the ground and internally.
Moreover, 2017 is an important year also from the party leadership perspective, since it witnessed, in September, the selection of Luigi Di Maio as candidate for prime minister in the 2018 General Elections. The young vice-president of the Camera dei deputati (the Italian Parliament’s Lower chamber) embodies the slow, controversial, and largely incomplete shift from an anti-system movement to a (would-be) ruling party.
Furthermore, It should also be taken into account the already metioned General Elections, that will be held earlier 2018. Those elections take to an end not just the parliamentary term, but, they will also close another important chapter for the Five star Movement: its first time and period in public office.
Thus, 2017 e 2018 can be seen as an important step of this movement-party in the roadmap to the form of political party organization gradually leaving the movement structure.
Indeed, over this period many features have been changed within the Five star organisation. It has deeply renovated some of its structural elements and rules: for example a new web platform (named Rousseau) for implementing deliberative democracy between militants and the leadership was implemented. A new organisational chart, a new associative statute (and structures), a new ethical code of the party was issued during the last few days of the 2017. Moreover, its language toned-down throughout the electoral campaign and the policy contents proposed tried to reconcile with a “government style” embodied by Luigi Di Maio. Its political culture has changed if compared with the beginning stage of the Five star, that is before entering the corridors of power.
It means that this organization, over the latest years, has been pursuing a deep change, which has transformed the Five star of the beginning. In this framework, the paper aim to discuss how and in which direction the Five Star project is going and what “model” of party is approaching.
This political actor is placed into the European populist wave and its success is largely due to its ability to combine elements of both left-wing and right-wing populism. But, it has also brought into play the innovative and post-modern use of tools like the web platform (and ideology) in politics and, in the meantime, the capability of being present in the traditional places like in the public squares. Five star movement is a sort of hybrid entity that offers also the idea that the direct democracy can be used in order to re-democratise from below established democracies in crisis.
This political actor outlines its complex route towards institutionalisation, within a scenario where also (representative) democracy is changing but is also challenged by populist political actors. However, in the meanwhile, populist party, like the Five star, are also changing within this frame, becoming progressively more “normal” and then more integrated in that system they wanted to «open like a can of tuna!», to mention Beppe Grillo, leader and founder of the Five star Movement.

 

Italians and Their Democracy. How the Economic Crisis Affected Voters’ Attitudes by Fulvio Venturino (University of Cagliari)

Since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008, many European party systems have been stressed by relevant changes. One may recall defeats and demises suffered by traditional parties, rise of new and anti-establishment parties [Abedi 2004; Heinisch and Mazzoleni 2016], and mounting troubles in the actual working of political institutions [Rombi and Venturino forthcoming]. Italy is not an exception to this general trend. There populist parties – such as Lega and above all Movimento 5 Stelle – have won exceptional successes, deadlocking after the 2013 parliamentary election the formation of the national government and the selection of the head of the state [Itanes 2013].
Seemingly, the crisis years have worsened the operative conditions of Italian political system, often depicted in the past as a not working democracy. This paper focuses on voters’ attitudinal changes underpinning the actual functioning of the Italian institutions. In the past, Italian citizens’ political culture has been frequently depicted by comparative researches as unfit for democratic practices [Almond and Verba 1963; Putnam 1993]. Building on this literature, I aim to find out whether during the last 12 years Italian voters’ attitudes toward democracy, its political actors and its political institutions have eventually degenerated. Relevant dimensions of the Italians’ political culture may be assessed through measures of trust, interest in politics, internal and external efficacy, sophistication, involvement, leader approval; they will be also related with supported parties [Knutsen 2018].
To do so, I make use of the Itanes (ITAlian National Election Studies) survey data collected in 2006, 2008, 2013 and 2018 during parliamentary elections. These data allow to retrace the Italians’ political attitudes before and during the years of the economic crisis.

 

Useless Approvals. The Italian Bicameralism and Its Decisional Capacity by Andrea Pedrazzani (University of Bologna) and Francesco Zucchini (University of Milan)

Under the rational choice assumptions and in condition of complete information, only two legislative outcomes are possible in a bicameral legislature. Either the two houses rapidly pass exactly the same bill or no bill is passed. However the outcomes we observe are inconsistent with these expectations. In real-world legislative politics upper chambers amend the bills that have been passed by lower chambers, legislative processes can last long, and sometimes pieces of legislation that are passed in one chamber never become law and just “die” in the other chamber. How can we account for such “failures” in the decision capacity of bicameral legislatures? What can explain the variations in the number of such “useless” approvals along time and across bills? In this paper we try to answer these questions by focusing on these “useless approvals” in the Italian parliament between 1979 and 2013. We find out that any difference in the party composition of the two chambers affects positively the chances of useless approvals, above all if the bill’s sponsor is an MP and the bill addresses different policy areas.

 

Collusion Between Mainstream Parties and Anti-Establishment Parties’ Success by Filippo Tronconi (University of Bologna) and Marco Valbruzzi (University of Bologna)

It is a common wisdom that outsider parties may take advantage of mainstream parties colluding with each other, either by participating in the same government coalition or significantly reducing their ideological distance. This reinforces populist or anti-establishment leaders claim to represent the only real alternative to traditional politics. The same argument can be presented in spatial terms – the more mainstream parties get closer to each other, the more political space is available for outsider challengers. Although very diffused, such arguments have received relatively little attention in the literature, especially in a comparative perspective. This is what we aim to do in this paper. We have assembled an original dataset including governmental coalitions and party positions in 17 Western European countries since 1980. In order to test the ‘collusion hypothesis’, we use coalitional formulas and ideological distance as independent variables to explain the electoral success of challenger parties. Our preliminary results show that the the relations between ideological convergence and Grand Coalition formulas and the rise of anti-establishment parties are not as straightforward as usually assumed in the literature.