Papers by Federico Vegetti
Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica
Electoral Studies, 2014
Recent comparative electoral research shows that both ideological and competence voting are influ... more Recent comparative electoral research shows that both ideological and competence voting are influenced by the degree of party system polarization. However, while the former association is uncontroversial, investigations on the latter have led to contradicting results. This study takes one step back, arguing that polarization rather affects how voters perceive party ideological positioning and competence. Building on literature linking elite polarization to mass partisanship, the study argues that party identification is a strong moderator of party evaluations in polarized elections. Hypotheses are tested with multilevel logit models on a pooled data set of European Election Studies from 1994 to 2009. Results show that partisans are more likely to view their preferred party as the most competent and ideologically close when the environment is polarized, while there is no such effect for non-partisans.
Rivista Italian di Scienza Politica (RISP), Dec 2013
Succeeding a right-wing coalition, since November 2011 Italy has been led by a technocratic gover... more Succeeding a right-wing coalition, since November 2011 Italy has been led by a technocratic government, appointed to implement austerity measures in the context of the Eurozone debt crisis. While the two ideologically rival party coalition leaders formally supported the government, other old and new actors built their campaigns around anti-system themes. We argue that, in such a blurred situation, in which is dramatically harder to evaluate parties based on economic considerations, voters could not rely as strongly as they could in the past on ideological (left-right) labels. Using data from a repeated cross-sectional survey running from March 2011 to February 2013 and propensity-to-vote (PTV) scores, this study aims to investigate whether the macro context reduced the impact of ideology on support for the center-left Democratic Party (PD) and the center-right People of Freedom (PDL) party. Results show that our expectations are only in part corroborated by the data. First, we find that the effect of ideological labels on both parties' evaluations remains strong and persistent over time. Second, the existence of a technocratic government and worsening economic conditions had an effect only on the evaluation of the PDL, but not on the evaluation of the PD.
This study investigates how Italian voters have reacted to the parliamentary “grand” coalition in... more This study investigates how Italian voters have reacted to the parliamentary “grand” coalition in support to the Monti government going from November 2011 to February 2013. We argue that the contradictory behaviour of the party elites, made of public quarrels on the one hand and of joint support of the government in Parliament on the other, might have provoked a deep disorientation of the voters. This in turn may have led to the depolarization of the electorate's judgement for the two major Italian parties, the left-wing Pd and the right-wing Pdl. We test this expectation relying on public opinion data covering a time period from March 2011 to February 2013. While our empirical analyses only partially corroborate the “depolarization” hypothesis, we find much stronger evidence that the two faced coalitional behaviour of the main parties came together with a persistent rise of negative feelings towards all the political parties, leading towards a potential “mass disengagement” from voting for them. We argue that our findings have important implications for understanding the most recent developments of electoral politics in Italy.
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Papers by Federico Vegetti