The Province of Bolzano/Bozen – South Tyrol is characterised by the fact that almost three quarters of the population belong to the German speaking or the so called Ladin minority. Since 1972 enjoys a special autonomy constitution giving the local government power over a wide range of policy fields. The national government of Italy granted these generous autonomy rights because of a very effective strategy put forward by an extremely strong ethnic political party – the Südtiroler Volkspartei (SVP) which in addition had the support of the Austrian government on the international level. Pallaver (2004) describes this particular constellation as a polarised (with regard to the special autonomy constitution) multi-party system with one ‘pre-dominant’ party – the SVP. Moreover it is a neatly segregated party system with at least two, eventually three electoral arenas (Atz 2007). In 2007 several organisations (NGOs, smaller political parties) collected the necessary number of signatures for a popular vote on different issues, the most significant of which was a new law on direct democracy with lower barriers and a broader field of application. It lasted until autumn 2009 until the referendum finally took place. The outcome was a clear vote in favour of all propositions but lacked to be valid because the requested participation quorum of 40% was missed by a fraction of an inch. It is the campaign for this referendum with altogether 5 different propositions I would like to analyse in some detail. The campaign was characterised by different clearly distinct phases starting with deliberate un-attention and ending with the illustration of catastrophic scenarios about chaos and non-governability in case of approval of the propositions. My hypothesis is that the particular complex political structure in the Province of Bolzano/Bozen had a decisive effect on the evolution of the campaign and its outcome.
