An exploratory study of populism: the municipality-level predictors of electoral outcomes in Italy
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An exploratory study of populism: the municipality‑level predictors of electoral outcomes in Italy Eugenio Levi1 · Fabrizio Patriarca2 Received: 5 December 2019 / Accepted: 1 July 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract By Using a machine-learning algorithm based on BIC, we set up a reduced set of best predictors for Italian populist parties using data on the 2018 general elections at municipality level. Two different and clear patterns emerge, which provide partial support to theories on economic insecurity, cultural backlash, and political detachment. The Five-Star Movement is stronger in larger and unsafer municipalities, where people are younger, more unemployed and work more in services. On the contrary, Lega thrives in smaller and safer municipalities, where people are less educated and employed more in manufacturing and commerce. In a second step, by using our best predictors we predict the vote of the Italian parties in France, Spain, and United Kingdom, and confront them with those countries’ actual electoral outcomes. Results confirm that our models are able to catch some common features of the ongoing reshaping of the political arena. In conclusion, our analysis suggests that populist parties are re-grouping votes astray from the previous left/right cleavage. Keywords Voting · Populism · Economic insecurity · Political economy JEL Classification D72 · F52 · G01 · J15 · O33 · Z13
We want to thank the participants to the 2019 SKILS workshop, the Editor Federico Revelli and the anonymous Referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. * Fabrizio Patriarca [email protected] Eugenio Levi [email protected] 1
Faculty of Economics and Management, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy
2
Department of Economics “Marco Biagi”, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy
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Economia Politica
1 Introduction There is a group of rising stars on the world’s political stage who do not object to being called populist. Among them, the US President Donald Trump, the former Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, the President of the French National Rally Marine Le Pen, the Spanish vice Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. What they have in common is that they all use an anti-elite rhetoric and exploit the decline of traditional players in the political arena.1 However, the more we move towards an empirical observation, the more populism appears as a multi-faceted phenomenon that is very hard to define. We can find both left-oriented and right-oriented populists, socially conservative and socially liberal, pro-taxes and against taxes, pro-environment and environmentally-neutral populists, and so on (see Kaltwasser et al. 2017, for a full account on different populist parties). Therefore, understanding the underlying factors of the so-called rise of populism in mature democracies is still an open issue and a difficult one. Many papers in political science and political economy have addressed the ques
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