From class voting to economic voting

Studies of Italian electoral behavior have generally devoted little attention to the relationship between economic conditions and voting choice. This has been due to the institutional characteristics of the Italian polity, which influenced mass electoral behavior in a direction quite far from the dimensions analyzed by comparative students of economic voting. The rational actor model – with its basic concepts of incumbency and policy voting, pocketbook and sociotropic electors – was found inadequate for a political system characterized by multiple parties, proportional representation, strong ideological and religious polarization at all levels, and class party allegiances. All of these are aspects that led to low electoral volatility and frequent cabinet crises, though counter-balanced by a basic continuity of government personnel, insured by the dominant role of the Christian Democratic Party (Dc) in every government up to 1994. ¹ From a comparative perspective this was no novelty: it has been shown that economic voting appears stronger in Westminster models of democracies than in consensual polities (Alt and Chrystal, 1983; Paldam, 1991). In an effort to account for such differences, recent research has devoted attention to the very institutional aspects which mediate between economics and politics, such as clarity of responsibility with regard to government management of the economy, minority government, and ideological leanings (Powell and Whitten, 1993; Anderson, 1995, 2000; Whitten and Palmer, 1999; Lewis-Beck and Paldam, 2000).