Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Party policy positions in Italy after pre-electoral coalition disintegration

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Acta Politica Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The Italian party system has recently been characterized by the formation and splits of pre-electoral coalitions. Different broad pre-electoral coalitions, which were set up in the scope of the 2006 national elections, disintegrated for the 2008 electoral campaign. This explorative study looks at the policy position of the main party coalitions regarding state involvement and social issues in the 2006 election campaign and their respective partners in the 2008 campaign. As such, we investigate where different parties that belonged to the same coalition in the previous election locate themselves after disintegration with respect to state involvement in economy and social policy dimensions. Using the computerized method Wordscores, we find mixed results with major coalition parties staying closest to the coalition's position on one issue but moving away from the coalition's position on the other issue. Minor leftist parties clearly look for a niche position after disintegration, whereas different patterns may be observed among the rightist minor parties.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. It is interesting to note that Golder (2006) finds in her study on electoral coalition dyads in 20 parliamentary democracies that such coalitions are more likely to be formed between partners that are similar in size. In the case of Italy, however, pre-electoral coalitions have been formed between parties of different electoral size.

  2. A detailed description of the Wordscores technique is provided in Laver et al (2003). See also http://wordscores.com for the Wordscores software. Our description of the method relies heavily on Benoit et al (2005, pp. 299–300), Laver et al (2003, p. 313) and Laver et al (2006, pp. 679–680).

  3. We do not include the 2008 election program of Di Pietro Italia dei Valori as it was only one page with only a few slogans. We also exclude Destra. Preliminary analyses consistently positioned Destra more left-wing than its program actually is. Previous research faced similar difficulties placing parties for which immigration and nationalism are important issues (such as Destra) correctly on left/right scales (Benoit and Laver, 2007b). Other, minor, parties are also left out given their lack of party manifestos.

  4. Given that we are only interested in comparing the relative positions of the virgin texts, we only present the so-called raw scores (Laver et al, 2003). These raw scores do not face the problems that occur when rescaling raw scores estimates as introduced by Laver et al (2003) (see Martin and Laver 2008) and are informative to answer our research question. However, this means that the assigned scores of the reference texts cannot be compared with the estimated virgin text scores (Benoit and Laver, 2007a, 2007b).

  5. In line with Laver et al (2003), significance is used to refer to the notion of uncertainty. As Laver et al (2003, p. 317) note: ‘Uncertainty in our usage is consistent with the statistical notion of uncertainty, representing confidence that an estimate reflects the true position rather than variation due to chance or other uncontrollable factors, since we regard the generation of texts by political actors to be a stochastic process’.

References

  • Adams, J., Clark, M., Ezrow, L. and Glasgow, G. (2004) Understanding change and stability in party ideologies: Do parties respond to public opinion or to past election results? British Journal of Political Science 34: 589–610.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Adams, J., Clark, M., Ezrow, L. and Glasgow, G. (2006) Are niche parties fundamentally different from mainstream parties? The causes and the electoral consequences of Western European parties’ policy shifts, 1976–1998. American Journal of Political Science 50 (3): 513–529.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Albertazzi, D. and McDonnell, D. (2005) The Lega Nord in the second Berlusconi government: In a league on its own. West European Politics 28 (5): 952–972.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Allern, E.H. and Aylott, N. (2009) Overcoming the fear of commitment: Pre-electoral coalitions in Norway and Sweden. Acta Politica 44 (3): 259–285.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bardi, L. (2007) Electoral change and its impact on the party system in Italy. West European Politics 30 (4): 711.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bellucci, P. (2008) The parliamentary election in Italy, April 2006. Electoral Studies 27: 151–190.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Benoit, K. and Laver, M. (2007a) Compared to what? A comment on ‘A robust transformation procedure for interpreting political text’ by Martin and Vanberg. Political Analysis 16: 101–111.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Benoit, K. and Laver, M. (2007b) Estimating party policy positions: Comparing expert surveys and hand-coded content analysis. Electoral Studies 26: 90–107.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Benoit, K., Laver, M., Arnold, C., Pennings, P. and Hosli, M.O. (2005) Measuring national delegate positions at the convention on the future of Europe using computerized word scoring. European Union Politics 6 (3): 291–313.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brunazzo, M. and Gilbert, M. (2008) The right sweeps the board. Journal of Modern Italian Studies 13 (3): 422–430.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Budge, I. and Pennings, P. (2007a) Do they work? Validating computerized word frequency estimates against policy series. Electoral Studies 26: 121–129.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Budge, I. and Pennings, P. (2007b) Missing the message and shooting the messenger: Benoit and Laver's ‘response’. Electoral Studies 26: 136–141.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coffé, H. and Plassa, R. (2010) Party policy position of Die Linke. A continuation of the PDS? Party Politics, advance access, http://ppq.sagepub.com/pap.dtl.

  • Coffé, H. and Torenvlied, R. (2008) Explanatory factors for the merger of political parties. Center for the Study of Democracy, University of Irvine, Paper 08’10.

  • Diamanti, I. (2007) The Italian centre-right and centre-left: Between parties and ‘the party’. West European Politics 30 (4): 733–762.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gianetti, D. and De Giorgi, E. (2006) The 2006 Italian general elections: Issues, dimensions and policy positions of political parties. Journal of Modern Italian Studies 11: 494–515.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Golder, S.N. (2005) Pre-electoral coalitions in comparative perspective: A test of existing hypotheses. Electoral Studies 24: 643–663.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Golder, S.N. (2006) Pre-electoral coalition formation in parliamentary democracies. British Journal of Political Science 36: 193–212.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ignazi, P. (2007) Italy. European Journal of Political Research. Political Yearbook 2006 46: 993–1004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Katz, R.S. (2006) Electoral reform in Italy: Expectations and results. Acta Politica 41: 285–299.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Klemmensen, R., Binzer Hobolt, S. and Ejnar Hansen, M. (2007) Estimating policy positions using political texts: An evaluation of the Wordscores approach. Electoral Studies 26: 746–755.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Klingemann, H.-D., Volkens, A., Bara, J., Budge, I. and Mc. Donald, M. (2006) Mapping Policy Preferences II. Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments in Eastern Europe, European Union and OECD 1990–2003. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kritzinger, S., Cavatorta, F. and Chari, R.S. (2004) Continuity and change in party positions towards Europe in Italian parties: An examination of parties’ manifestos. Journal of European Public Policy 11 (6): 954–974.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Laver, M., Benoit, K. and Garry, J. (2003) Extracting policy positions from political texts using words as data. American Journal of Political Science Review 97 (2): 311–331.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laver, M., Benoit, K. and Sauger, N. (2006) Policy competition in the 2002 French legislative and presidential elections. European Journal of Political Research 45: 667–697.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lowe, W., Benoit, K., Mikhaylov, S. and Laver, M. (2009) Scaling policy positions from hand-coded political texts. Paper prepared for the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association; 2–5 April, Chicago.

  • Martin, P. (2000) Comprendre les evolutions électorales. Le théorie des réalignements revisitée. Paris: Sciences Po.

    Google Scholar 

  • Martin, L.W. and Laver, M. (2008) A robust transformation procedure for interpreting political text. Political Analysis 16: 93–100.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Micus, M. (2007) Stärkung des Zentrums. Pespektiven, Risiken und Chancen des Fusionsprozesses von PDS und WASG. In: T. Spier, F. Butzlaff, M. Micus and F. Walter (eds.) Die Linkspartei. Zeitgemäße Idee oder Bündnis ohne Zukunft?. Wiesbaden, Germany: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 185–238.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, A. (2009) The Italian election of April 2008: A political earthquake? West European Politics 32 (1): 215–225.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Luigi Curini for his valuable comments. They are also grateful to Kenneth Benoit and Vincent Buskens for methodological suggestions, and Luc Geeraert for excellent editorial help.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology/ICS, University of Utrecht, Heidelberglaan 2, Utrecht, 3584 CS, the Netherlands

    Hilde Coffé & Barbara Da Roit

Authors
  1. Hilde Coffé
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Barbara Da Roit
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hilde Coffé.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table A1.

Table a1 Overview of the scales (reference to the party manifesto project between brackets)
Full size table

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Coffé, H., Da Roit, B. Party policy positions in Italy after pre-electoral coalition disintegration. Acta Polit 46, 25–42 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2010.16

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2010.16

Keywords

Search

Navigation