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Salience: Putting Decentralization on the Agenda: The Role of Political Parties

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The Party Politics of Decentralization

Part of the book series: Comparative Territorial Politics ((COMPTPOL))

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Abstract

This chapter deals with the uneven path of decentralist reforms in Italy by focusing on the first component of party strategy—namely the manipulation of salience. Through an agenda-setting approach, the analysis shows that it is only when most of the actors within a political system have simultaneously emphasized decentralization that the issue will rise to the top of the party system agenda (PSA) and policy change becomes likely.

The second part of the chapter examines the importance of the dynamics of party competition in influencing the PSA. In particular, empirical data support the widely believed argument that leftist and autonomist parties have played key roles in bringing attention to decentralist reforms.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Document I, n. 11 “Message to the Chambers by the President of the Republic,” transmitted to the presidency on June, 26 1991.

  2. 2.

    Froio et al. (2016, 8) also test the hypothesis of responsiveness of the legislative agenda to both government and opposition party agendas but find only partial evidence of such a correlation.

  3. 3.

    These dynamics of party competition were originally described by Meguid (2005, 2008), although she refers exclusively to new, niche parties as the main proponents of new issues (Basile 2015).

  4. 4.

    The median has been preferred to the mean because it is less sensitive to the outliers. In this way, it was possible to also include the manifestos of the LN (for which territorial issues represent the raison d’être) in the calculation of the overall salience in the PSA at a given point in time.

  5. 5.

    This value is obtained by computing the mean saliency score of all the 56 categories included in the content analysis carried out by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) in four countries (Italy, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Spain), which is 1.6%, with a standard deviation 1.54%. Alonso finds that only 16% of the categories included in the CMP display average saliency scores above 2% (e.g., “Welfare state” has a mean value of 6%). She therefore argues that “percentages above four are already quite large and rare, if we look at the totality of manifestos” (Alonso 2012, 67). Moreover, based on her analysis, the issue of “decentralization” is the fourth-most mentioned category, with 4.9% average mentions.

  6. 6.

    The threshold for considering something an outlier is based on the computation used to obtain the box and whisker plot of the salience of the territorial dimension in all the manifestos included in the dataset. Conventionally, outliers are all those data points below the first interquantile −1.5 multiplied for the interquartile range or above the third interquartile +1.5 multiplied for interquartile range. In this case, all the manifestos with a saliency score for decentralization above 11% can be considered outliers. They are mostly the manifestos of the Lega Nord .

  7. 7.

    For 1996, the TERRISS Dataset coded both the manifestos of the two main coalitions ( Ulivo and Polo delle Libertà ) and the manifestos of their member parties. To avoid double counting parties, the calculation of the median includes only the two coalition manifestos. The median value including all documents for 1996 is 5.19%, while by considering only the coalition manifestos and that of the LN it is 5.30%. Likewise, the joint document of the CCD-CDU of 2001 has been excluded from the calculation of that year’s median because the program of these parties was included in the manifesto of the coalition Casa delle Libertà (the median including the CCD-CDU document was 2.4%, while it was 3.8% without this document).

  8. 8.

    As in Chap. 2, policy change has been calculated by adding 1 to the DI score to avoid null values.

  9. 9.

    The PCI obtained 25.26% of the vote in the 1963 elections, but the vote share for the party was respectively 39.5% in Tuscany, 35.8% in Emilia-Romagna , and 36% in Umbria. The mean of the votes for the Chamber of Deputies in the constituencies of Tuscany (Siena, Arezzo, Grosseto; Firenze, Pistoia; Pisa, Livorno, Lucca, Massa Carrara), Emilia Romagna (Mantova, Cremona; Parma, Modena, Piacenza, Reggio Emilia; Bologna, Ferrara, Ravenna, Forlì) and Umbria (Perugia, Terni, Rieti). Author’s own elaboration of data from http://elezionistorico.interno.it/index.php?tpel=C&dtel=28/04/1963&tpa=I&tpe=A&lev0=0&levsut0=0&es0=S&ms=S (accessed March 29, 2017). In Emilia-Romagna, if one excludes the vote in Mantova-Cremona (26.5%), the mean of the vote rises up to 40.5%.

  10. 10.

    The PSI obtained 13.84% of the vote in the 1963 elections, with a vote share of 16.3% in Tuscany and 14.7% in Emilia-Romagna .

  11. 11.

    This strategy was actually rewarded by younger voters, as Höbel (2004) recalls, as the PCI gained 1.6% points in the Chamber of Deputies from the previous election, with an increase of voting among younger people. Among younger voters, the PCI reached 43.5%.

  12. 12.

    The ANOVA was also run controlling for the interaction effect of the period of observation, both before and after 1992.

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  1. University of Siena, Siena, Italy

    Linda Basile

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Basile, L. (2019). Salience: Putting Decentralization on the Agenda: The Role of Political Parties. In: The Party Politics of Decentralization. Comparative Territorial Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75853-4_3

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