Category: election

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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

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Looking retrospectively at the 2018 Italian general election: the state of the economy and the presence of foreigners

Scholars agree that two major issues oriented voting behaviours during the Italian general election of 2018. The first was the state of the economy, which had not yet recovered from the lowest points reached during the Great Recession, but had nevertheless exhibited some marginal improvement. The second issue originated from another crisis, the refugee and asylum emergency, which contributed to increasing the presence of foreigners in Italy and the salience of the migration issue.
The article investigates the impact of these two types of problem on the 2018 election results by using aggregated objective data at the municipal level. It finds confirmation of the two issues’ impact on retrospective punishment of the incumbent Democratic Party also when using spatial regression models distinguishing the direct influence and the spill-over effects of the poor state of the economy and an increase in the size of the foreign population.

Giuliani M (2022). Looking retrospectively at the 2018 Italian general election: the state of the economy and the presence of foreigners. Contemporary Italian Politics, 14(1): 4-23, DOI: 10.1080/23248823.2021.2004640

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“Piove governo ladro”. Crisi globali e voto economico

Check on NaspRead the synthesis of three of my recent articles dealing with the electoral answer to a crisis situation (written before the Covid19 emergency).

How will the electorate react to the present crisis? What about the myopic attribution of the responsabilities suggested by a realist approach to retrospective voting.  And what about the hypotheses of benchmarking the situation and the capacity of managing the health emergency (tests, vaccines, lockdowns, differentiated policy measures…)?