The 2020 regional elections in Italy: Sub-national politics in the year of the pandemic

Abstract

This article focuses on eight regional elections held in Italy in 2020, the year of the Coronavirus pandemic. It looks at both the January and September rounds. Even though these two sets of elections took place, respectively, at the end and at the beginning of two distinctive ‘phases’, separated by the Covid-19 outbreak, they share some important characteristics. The discussion starts from a short overview of the events leading to the polling days, looking in particular at pre-election coalition building, the electoral campaigns and the positioning of key leaders. It then moves onto the analysis of the election results. It considers changes in political participation, support for the major parties, the strengthening of local and non-partisan lists, volatility and shifts in political representation. The overall pattern is one of increasing territorial complexity and fragmentation: regional elections now clearly follow a logic of their own, dominated more by local leaders than by national parties.

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This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/23248823.2021.1912301

Repository URI

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/7eac6ce4-58eb-4a74-be77-7a3b936031b9