Without Roots: How Olive Grove Extermination Strengthened the Far Right in Italy

• In Event: Mini-Conference on Politics in Post-industrial Societies III: Place, Identity, and Grievances amidst Economic Crises

Abstract

We examine the electoral consequences of a sudden economic disruption of traditional forms of agriculture. We specifically focus the outbreak of the bacterium Xylella Fastidiosa in the Southern Italian region of Apulia, one of Europe's leading olive oil-producing region, in 2014 which exterminated centuries-old olive groves. By exploiting geographic variation in the spread of the disease and georeferenced municipal-level data, we use a difference-in-differences design to quantify the economic disruption associated with the spread of Xylella Fastidiosa and its electoral consequences. The disease generated an average loss of 1 per cent of yearly post-tax income per capita in infected municipalities. This economic disruption also had important political consequences: far right parties gained an excess vote share of 3.7 percentage points in affected areas due to increases in turnout and an electoral loss of far-left parties. The vote shares of the regional incumbent, a large left-wing coalition responsible for managing the disaster and administering damage relief, remained unaffected. We combine a machine-learning approach and qualitative fieldwork in purposefully selected municipalities to identify the community- and individual-level mechanisms that underlie the economic disruptions and its electoral consequences.

Authors

• Simone Cremaschi, Bocconi University

• Catherine E. De Vries, Bocconi University