Class Voting in Italy: a New Realignment?

Class voting in Italy has traditionally been weaker than in many other Western European countries, due to the powerful impact of territorial sub-cultures, religiosity, anti-communism, and clientelism, and has tended to decline since the 1980s (Ballarino et al. 2009; Bellucci 2001; Bellucci & Segatti 2011). In the latest rounds of general (Maraffi 2018) and European elections, however, class voting has experienced a paradoxical resurgence. The strength of this variable increased, but its direction changed: while upper classes shifted toward centre-left parties, lower classes flocked first to the ‘valence populist’ Five Stars Movement and later to the right-wing populist League. This realignment is coherent with the predicted impact of the new ‘integration-demarcation’ cleavage posited by several political scientists (Hooge & Marks 2018; Kriesi et al. 2006) and clearly visible in political events across Europe over the last decades (the rise of right-wing populism among the working class, a class polarization around attitudes toward the European Union, Macron, Brexit and its aftermath). Using data from the ITANES (national and European) election surveys from 1968 to 2019, the present papers revisits the extent and contours of this realignment of Italian class voting, advancing the hypothesis that its main driver is to be found in the policies and behaviour of the centre-left coalition during the ‘Second Republic’.