Does economic insecurity drive the electorate toward right? Evidence from the 2022 Italian elections

In the 2022 Italian general elections, the voter turnout reached an all-time low in the history of the Italian republic. The center-right wing coalition, led by current Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of the far-right party Fratelli d’Italia, emerged as the clear winner of the electoral competition. This occurred amidst a progressive increase in electoral abstention and long-standing sentiments of lack of representation. Furthermore, Italy has experienced prolonged economic stagnation, high unemployment rates, and low wages over the past two decades, further compounded by the insecurity brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic and dim economic prospects for the future. In this article, we examine the relationship between Italy's economic situation and the 2022 national elections, which witnessed a high level of abstention and marked vote share for far-right parties. Considering transforming factors of political participation, individual economic insecurity, job insecurity, and socio-economic inequalities are often regarded as significant drivers of far-right electoral successes. Building on the literature on the economy's effects on political behavior, in which we can also glimpse how this assumption has recently been put into question, we hypothesize that this is not always the case. Specifically, we hypothesize that this is not the case for national elections in Italy, in which economic insecurity mostly deters voters from casting their ballots, and that the vote share linked to economic insecurity is mainly collected by the Movimento 5 Stelle party. Thus, other motivations must be considered to address the issue of far-right electoral success in the Italian context. Our study endeavors to test the hypotheses we have proposed by conducting a statistical analysis on original post-electoral survey data collected by the Electoral observatory Lapolis. Our primary objective is to challenge the widely held assumption that economic insecurity drives the electorate towards the right. Additionally, we aim to bridge a gap in the current scholarship on Italian elections, and to make a novel contribution to the existing literature on the factors of participation, particularly from the perspective of the economy.