Did the citizenship income scheme do it? The supposed electoral consequence of a flagship policy

Citizenship income credit card

In the aftermath of the 2022 Italian legislative elections, but also during the entire electoral campaign, several claims were made that much of the electoral support for the Five Star Movement had been triggered by the ‘Reddito di cittadinanza’ – the welfare policy introduced in 2019 by the yellow–green government. This research note first distinguishes between distributive politics and policy voting, and then explores the empirical relationship between the geographical provision at the municipal level of the citizenship income and the vote for the party led by Giuseppe Conte. While traditional multivariate analyses fail to reveal any spurious relationship, matching techniques help highlight the absence of any causal relationship between the two variables.

 Marco Giuliani (2023).  Did the citizenship income scheme do it? The supposed electoral consequence of a flagship policy. Italian Political Science Review DOI: 10.1017/ipo.2023.19

Italy in the Council of the European Union: votes and statements

The Council of the European Union is considered to be ‘a consensus machine’. Yet, disagreements still happen at the voting stage, with abstentions, oppositions, and statements defining the positions of national delegations even at the end of long bargaining processes. 

This article explores the behaviours of Italian representatives in the Council from 1995 to 2019. The analysis uses roll call data to test expectations emerging from the previous comparative literature in the context of this more demanding single-country research design. Amongst the hypotheses, the results confirm that chairing the Council, and the partisanship of governments on the ideological and EU integration dimensions, are systematically associated with various ways in which opposition and dissent are expressed. Furthermore, we find that caretaker cabinets and government heterogeneity also reduce the likelihood of Italian disagreements in the Council.

 Marco Giuliani (2023) Italy in the Council of the European Union: votes and statements, Contemporary Italian Politics, DOI: 10.1080/23248823.2023.2220187 

Absolute and benchmarked economic voting. A subnational perspective on a decade of elections in Southern Europe

The article analyses the 15 elections that took place between 2010 and 2019 in four South European countries – Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain – through the lenses of the retrospective vote theory. 

The large within-country variation of economic conditions justifies the adoption of an original subnational perspective, while the explicit test of alternative economic quantities and horizons provides a more credible assessment of voters’ behaviours. 

Besides offering a taxonomy of local retrospective voting, the research found that citizens assessed the incumbents against regional unemployment levels and national growth dynamics, further benchmarking the local economic conditions against their past performances. These results give credit to the idea that the South European electorate shares similar references in assessing the economic competences of incumbent governments.

 Marco Giuliani (2022) Absolute and benchmarked economic voting. A subnational perspective on a decade of elections in Southern Europe, South European Society and Politics, 27(2): 279–303, DOI: 10.1080/13608746.2023.2202468