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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

Check the dataset and code

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Westminster as Usual? Three Interpretations for the UK Democracy

The Brexit process has shattered the foundations of British politics, with prime ministerial resignations, government defeats, continuous rebellions and floor-crossings. These phenomena seem at odds with the usual decisiveness of Westminster systems. However, the aforementioned departures from the British tradition could be interpreted as compatible with the typical distance of any empirical reality from theoretical models, as exceptions to the rule due to the specificity of the European issue, or as the surfacing of some deeper social, economic and cultural tensions. Data alone are insufficient to confirm any of the alternative interpretations, although they seem to confirm the existence of longterm dynamics rather than some short-term exceptionalism. Within this scenario, the article suggests that a series of institutional innovations introduced since the late 1990s have facilitated the political consolidation of those tensions, contributed to the partisan dealignment, and made room for a potential departure from a Westminster model of democracy.

Giuliani M (2022). Westminster as Usual? Three Interpretations for the UK Democracy. Government and Opposition: An International Journal of Comparative Politics 57(3): 552-568 . https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2021.20

Check the data if you are interested in divisions, rebellions and defeats in the UK parliament from 1997 to 2019 (and don’t forget to cite the work if you use it)

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Political leaning and spread of Covid-19 during the US 2020 presidential election

Was there any geographical association between the incidence of Covid-19  and the political preferences of the US electorate in the period of the 2020 presidential election? This is what Kami Hacoyan, Kerem Demirsoylu and Ozge Atli – a group of Bachelor’s students of my class in Comparative Political Systems – asked themselves. You can read their paper here, and also download their data in csv format.