Land Inequality and the Origins of Neo-Fascism in Post-war Italy

• In Event: Political Parties in 20th Century Regime Transitions: Europe and Turkey

Abstract

What explains the rise of the neo-fascist party Italian Social Movement (MSI) in post-transitional Italy? While the literature has highlighted the role of the petty bourgeoisie, in this article I empirically demonstrate that Italian wealthy landowners played a crucial role for the success of this party.

The relationship between large landowners and Fascism can be traced back to the early days of the movement. Several studies on the emergence of Fascism in Italy highlight the crucial role of the landowning elite for the success of the movement (Brustein 1991; Elazar 2000; Acemoglu et al. 2022). In a very recent study, Acemoglu et al. (2022) empirically show that “the support of large landholders for the fascist cause” was “critical for the rise of the Fascist Party in the countryside”. While these authors emphasize the threat of a socialist revolution in the countryside, other authors such as Brustein (1991) make a similar argument but adding instead that the “red menace” explanation was incomplete for it ignored the fact that in rural areas “many individuals chose the Fascists because the Fascist program most closely represented their material interests”. Speaking to this argument, also Elazar (2000) showed that the clientelistic linkages in areas where the landowning groups dominated economic and political relationships though a system of patronage over the rural population — namely, in the South and Islands — were more prone to becoming Fascist, facilitating the emergence of the movement.

In exchange for facilitating the penetration of the Fascist movement, the regime was compelled to distribute benefits to the owners of large lands that contributed to the promotion of the regime in rural areas. Using original archival data collected for the years during the Fascist regime in Italy, in this article, I show that after transitions to democracy, the neo-fascist party MSI was most electorally successful in areas in which the landowning segment of the population was more concentrated during the regime’s length. While this segment of the population lost their benefits with the democratic transition, the MSI promised to reestablish them being against the land redistribution laws implemented by the current Italian government. Using clientelistic hegemony as a proxy for the regime’s distribution of benefits to landowners, I empirically demonstrate that areas in which landowners were the more benefited during the dictatorship — and thus, suffered more losses with the democratic transition — voted more for the neo-Fascist party, in the newly formed party system.

In a second empirical analysis, using original data from Agrarian Italian census, I also show that the Italian provinces in which wealthy landowners were more concentrated, tended to vote more for the MSI, as opposed to other segments of the rural population such as small landowners, daily laborers, annual laborers, or sharecroppers.

Lastly, I show that the experience of regime repression in Italy decreased the vote in the MSI in the most affected Italian provinces.

The main objective of this article is to contribute to the extremely under-studied emergence of neo-Fascist in post-WWII Italy, a particularly surprising feature after the experience of a brutal Fascist regime.

Author

• Catarina Leão, Sciences Po