Electoral Accountability in the Italian Regions. The Effects of a Double Crisis

• In Event: Leadership, Media, Politics, and Pandemics: The Italian Case

Abstract

Electoral accountability is a crucial dimension of the quality of democracy (Powell 2000; Diamond and Morlino 2004; Rombi 2014) and describes a bottom-up relationship between voters and governments (or representatives). Understood as a democratic principle, it is based on the practice according to which the rulers are called to give account to the voters of their (mis)behavior while in office. In analytical terms, electoral accountability can be examined by looking at both the conditions that allow its operation (‘potential accountability’) and its actual occurrence (‘actual accountability’). These two analytical dimensions are by no means mutually exclusive. By contrast, they are strictly intertwined, as the former can be seen as a precondition for the occurrence of the latter.
In relation to the conditions influencing the functioning of electoral accountability, we have to consider the institutional environments (Anderson 2000) as well as specific party system's features. With regard to the assessment of its actual occurrence, the literature has operationalized the concept starting from the model of retrospective voting (Manin 1997; Cheibub and Przeworski 1999; Przeworski, Stokes, and Manin 1999), that is, by looking at the electorate’s capacity to reward or sanction the incumbent government on the basis of its policy performance (i.e., retrospective economic voting).
Most studies (Fisher and Hobolt 2010; Kayser and Peress 2012; Gélineau 2013) investigated the electoral accountability – both actual and potential – on a national basis and, often, in a larger comparative perspective. Instead, few studies have hitherto examined local or regional politics (Vampa 2020), investigating in particular the quality of subnational democracy, which appears to be quite surprisingly in a context increasingly characterized by multi-level governance.
In this respect, Italy is a very interesting case, in the light of its peculiar regionalism and, even more so, the significant differences existing between the regions, in terms of both institutional and socio-economic performance (Putnam 1993; Vassallo 2013).
This paper aims to investigate both sides of electoral accountability at the regional level. In particular, we will analyze the elections that have been held in the 20 Italian regions since the explosion of the Great Recession in 2008 until the last regional elections, which took place in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. In the first part of the paper, looking at the 20 regions in a comparative perspective, we will investigate the evolution of the political and institutional conditions favoring or hindering electoral accountability. These conditions will be selected starting from the key concept of “clarity of responsibility” (Powell 2000). More specifically, we will consider the probability of alternation in government (Pasquino and Valbruzzi 2011), the fragmentation of the regional councils, the fragmentation and polarization of the regional party systems, the composition of government coalitions, the congruence between the reduction (increase) of electoral votes and the reduction (increase) of assembly seats. At this stage, we expect that the elections held in the midst of the economic crisis (2008-2011) and in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis (2020) have, on the whole, worsened the conditions of electoral accountability.
In the second part, suggesting some inferential models, we will move from the analysis of the electoral accountability at the regional level to the empirical investigation of its consequences on the quality of regional government. In more detail, we will test the hypothesis whereby the incumbent regional government is punished by voters in the event of poor policy performance. In pursuing this goal, we will mainly look at macro-economic variables. The control variables that will be taken into account are the following: political and institutional factors; time-varying factors related to the economic and health crisis; the congruence (divergence) between the political color of the regional government and that of the national government.

Authors

• Stefano Rombi, University of Cagliari

• Marco Valbruzzi