Governments, Political Space and Party System in Italy (2018-23): A Content Analysis of the Parliamentary Debates over the Investiture Speeches of the Italian Populist Governments

The paper presents a study of the party positions in the Italian Parliament based on an inductive approach to the parliamentary debate and votes of investiture on the two governments led by G. Conte (2018-2020) and the one actually in office and led by G. Meloni (2022-). Through a content analysis of the parliamentary debate on the votes of investiture of these three governments, a survey is provided of the political themes tackled by the government incumbents and by the main Italian parliamentary groups. The scope of the research is to assess the alignments of the Italian parties after the decline of the traditional left-to-right cleavage and the rise of the populist trend. Firstly, the multidimensional character of the space of competition is highlighted. Finally, the paper tackles the controversy about the existence of two populist moods, the leftist and the rightist, showing the difference between the two and questioning whether populism can be considered an ideology or rather a particular declension of the political discourse in an era of demise of politics.