Are we all in the same boat? Voting in critical times in Southern Europe

Looking back from the year 2021, the past decade seems to have been squeezed between two global crises: the Great Recession at its beginning, and the Covid-19 pandemic at its end. But it was not a peaceful decade either, with economic distress prolonging itself in Southern Europe more than elsewhere, and with populist and opposition parties exploiting the migration issue (a third crisis) against incumbents. During the past decade, there have been altogether 15 general elections in the four major South-European countries, some of them in short and interconnected sequences. The aim of the paper is to explore whether there were some common drivers of electoral behavior during those years. To do so, it focuses especially on the eight major elections after the technical end of the Great Recession (Greece 2015 and 2019; Italy 2013 and 2018; Portugal 2015 and 2019; Spain 2015 and 2019). The reference theoretical framework is the theory of retrospective behavior, and the empirical analysis is based on an original dataset pooling subnational objective data in the four countries. The exploration of the common drivers focuses on the electoral consequences of the state of the economy and of the presence of immigrants, undoubtedly the two most problematic issues of the decade according to the Eurobarometer surveys. There are several possibilities in regard to common or diverse electoral dynamics. Each country may be sensitive to a different issue (e.g. to the economy instead of immigration, or to neither of the two); each period may have its own common drivers (e.g. economy in the first election after the end of the recession, and migration in the last election of the decade); different political systems may share the same electoral dynamics but with a different reference system (e.g. unemployment levels may affect the incumbent’s support everywhere, but what is considered to be a physiological or an unacceptable percentage of job seekers varies from country to country). This study can contribute to different streams of research. First, it can contribute to the theory of retrospective voting by considering whether different saliency levels affect which issues contribute most to the incumbent’s punishment or reward. Second, it can help resolve the issue of benchmarking, which has recently been reconsidered because of some previous methodological weaknesses. Third, it can clarify the idea of ‘South-Europeanness’ by reflecting on what the electorates of the four countries share, and what they do not.