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Abstract
In May 2015, 19 million Italians were called to renew the legislative assemblies and presidencies of seven regions, thus concluding an electoral cycle begun in February 2013 that involved all the 15 ordinary statute regions. Beyond their immediate relevance – of the 15 incumbent presidents only three were confirmed in office – these elections represented a turning point for regional party systems, paralleling the earthquake of the 2013 general elections. The ‘fragmented bipolarism’ characterising elections in Italy at the two levels since the mid-1990s, has been replaced by a multipolar competition, as a consequence of the consolidating presence of the Movimento 5 Stelle and the internal divisions of the centre-right coalition. At the same time, fragmentation of regional councils has remained high. The evolution of regional party systems and patterns of competition are analysed in this paper, taking into account the electoral offer, turnout and results in the majoritarian and proportional arenas of the 15 ordinary statute regions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Veneto, Liguria, Toscana, Marche, Umbria, Campania and Puglia.
2. At the time of the general elections (February 2013), Renzi was the mayor of Florence. He had unsuccessfully tried to gain the leadership of the centre-left coalition in a heated primary election in December 2012 (Pasquino & Valbruzzi Citation2013), before becoming the secretary of the PD in December 2013.
3. At the end of 2013 Silvio Berlusconi re-adopted the name that the party had between 1994 and 2009. In that year, Forza Italia and Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance) merged to form the Popolo della Libertà. The LN, while refusing to join this newly created party, confirmed its participation in the centre-right coalition.
4. This is now true for all ordinary regions except for Marche and Liguria. As an effect of further reforms and a ruling of the Constitutional Court (no. 188 of 2011) preventing the allocation of additional seats, which was originally foreseen in the 1995 electoral law, it is now possible for a president to be elected without a majority of supporting seats in the assembly.
5. De Luca was elected and immediately suspended from office. However, his appeal was upheld by the Tribunal of Naples, and he was allowed to take office as president, while waiting for a final ruling of the Constitutional Court.
6. According to the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, almost 300 regional councillors and presidents were under investigation for misuse of public money at the end of 2013 (see F. De Remigis, ‘In Italia più della metà delle Regioni sotto inchiesta, primato europeo di consiglieri indagati per peculato: sono 280’, Il Sole 24 Ore, 15 November 2013). Among the politicians under investigation during 2013–15, one could name Roberto Formigoni, president of Lombardy, Roberto Cota (Piedmont), Vasco Errani (Emilia-Romagna), Giuseppe Scopelliti (Calabria) and Vito De Filippo (Basilicata).
7. The concept of ‘second order elections’ has been widely applied to European elections, indicating that voters use them to express their support or disapproval towards actors located in the ‘first order’ (i.e. state-level) arena. In general, second order elections are expected to show lower participation, to reward outsider and new parties and to punish governing parties, unless they take place immediately after general elections, during the ‘honeymoon’ period. A discussion of regional elections as a second order arena can be found in Schakel and Jeffery (Citation2013).
8. According to the well-known formulation of Gary Cox (Citation1997), in a situation of perfect equilibrium voters should concentrate their preferences on M+1 candidates, with M representing the number of seats to be allocated. In the competition for the office of president, where there is only one seat at stake, all votes should go to the first two candidates.
9. Party system de-institutionalisation is here broadly defined as high instability and unpredictability of patterns of interaction among parties and between voters and parties. Empirical indicators of de-institutionalisation include, for instance, the level of electoral volatility and the degree of stability of governmental coalitions in a given period of time. See Chiaramonte & Emanuele (Citation2015) for a recent discussion of this concept.