The 2013 Italian general elections produced a largely unexpected and destabilizing outcome. The major surprise came from the Movimento 5 stelle (M5s, Five star movement), a brand new, anti-establishment political force which got more than 25% of the valid votes and turned out to be the largest party list in the domestic arena of the Chamber of deputies. The destabilizing nature of the outcome stemmed from the lack of a real winner which ended up in political stalemate. In fact, the center-left won in the Chamber of deputies, but not in the Senate and could not form a cabinet by itself. In the end, the Partito democratico (Pd, Democratic Party) was left with the only unpalatable option to have to form a ‘grand governing coalition’ with Berlusconi’s Popolo delle libertà (Pdl, People of freedom). Indeed, the widespread expectation was that the center-left would win with a large margin. For a long time before the vote most of the polls had indicated that Bersani’s lead was large enough to make his coalition gain the absolute majority of seats in both chambers either alone or together with the Monti’s coalition. It was not the case. Actually, what really happened in the ballot box on February 24th and 25th is still unclear to some extent. Here we will try to give a brief and preliminary explanation, analyzing the background to the election, the results and the role played by the electoral systems, the aggregate vote shifts between the 2013 and 2008 elections, the geographical distributions of the vote, and, finally, the transformation of the party system.

In 2011 Italian local elections we observed high electoral mobility: in Milan, for example, the center-left gained his first-time victory in the Berlusconi era, while in Naples there was a significant split voting in the first round and a huge turnaround between the first and the second ballot. A general research question emerged: are the shifts in the results understandable trough a left-right axis (political nature hypothesis of these elections) or were there cross-cutting mechanisms (local nature hypothesis of the elections with a strong role of personal aspects)? To answer the question we analyze the voting ecological estimates in the three biggest cities involved in 2011 elections: Milan, Naples and Turin. For every matrix we generated the estimates both applying the traditional Goodman model (for the whole city and splitting by district) and the hierarchical multinomial-dirichlet model developed by Rosen, Jiang, King and Taner. The most important result of our study is the strong political polarization of the vote in the two northern cities and a great importance of the local factors in Naples, where only a dominant role of the candidates can make sense of the detected shifts in voting behaviour.

-. (2008). La legislazione elettorale italiana. Come cambiarla e perché.

This article has the purpose to assess if and how party system nationalization affects individual voting behaviour. Previous studies on party system nationalization have focused on systemic processes, exclusively dealing with aggregate data. The authors address this topic from a new empirical perspective, arguing that party system nationalization could act as a context dimension interacting with the vote choice function. How does this specific context dimension moderate the explanatory power of individual level characteristics? On which determinants of vote choice does party system nationalization have a greater impact? To answer these questions, the authors focus on 23 European countries through the use of the 2009 European Election Study. The empirical analysis shows that in nationalized contexts the impact of the left-right dimension on party support is higher than in territorialized contexts, while that of class as well as of culture-related variables is lower. The authors also discuss the implications of these findings.