Research

Why does support for mainstream parties decline? A growing literature points to economic loss as a source of political resentment. We bring this explanation one step further. We posit that the local economy qualifies the role of social capital in forging systemic support. When the economy thrives, social capital buffers discontent via interpersonal interactions. When the economy declines it exacerbates discontent, leading to a diffusion of grievances. We test our “networks of grievances” hypothesis in two settings. We first test our theory in Italy, which offers individual-level information together with fine-grained municipality-level social capital data. Second, we test the mechanism underlying our theory combining survey and local administrative data across 18 European countries. The results suggest that “networks of grievances” operate as channels of political discussions with peers, converting retrospective evaluations into systemic discontent bringing non-mainstream parties into voters’ choice sets.

Are nostalgic authoritarian memories stigmatized? Far-right parties are increasingly successful in the EU, and some countries are even in a phase of democratic backsliding. While previous research would suggest that authoritarian experiences leave lasting marks of stigma, a warning against the authoritarian camp, we are witnessing the far-right parties succeed, even in democracies that experienced fascist rule. I address this puzzle by investigating the interaction between memory and politics, focusing on the (lack of) stigmatization of authoritarian nostalgia. I survey how Italians remember their fascist past, and whether memories favourable to the past dictatorship are stigmatized. Using an original survey and employing three different experimental strategies, I find that there is no stigmatization of authoritarian nostalgia. While doing that, I map Italy's views of its fascist past, measuring the memory of an authoritarian phase for the first time. The inability to stigmatize authoritarian nostalgia and the perceived divisiveness of the country's collective memory can help us understand how the success of far-right political actors was possible. The paper points out the importance of an inclusive democratic culture—and a shared collective memory—as a way of preventing a mainstreaming of nostalgic views of past authoritarian experiences.

This paper examines how information on collective action affects the social policy preferences of voters, in context of the COVID-19 crisis. What happens to the social policy preferences of voters when their expectations concerning collective behavior are met, or exceeded? And what conversely occurs when these expectations are unmet, and their trust is thereby breached? Leveraging a quasi-experimental survey directed to a representative sample of Italian voters, this paper examines the extent to which information on lockdown compliance rates affects voter social policy preferences, conditional on their pre-treatment levels of displayed trust. In examining voter attitudes towards distinct social policy dimensions, we find that trust is most closely linked to attitudes on social policy generosity, as opposed to universalism and conditionality. Moreover, we find the effect of trust to be moderated primarily by material concerns of voters, where direct beneficiaries of social transfers are less affected by our trust treatment.

Far-right scholars have focused extensively on the causes and consequences of far-right success, while not much attention has been directed towards what citizens and the civil society can do to tackle this phenomenon. Focusing on the surge of an anti-far-right social movement - the Sardine - during the 2020 Italian Regional Elections, we test whether grassroots mobilization is an effective tool to curb far-right parties’ electoral performance. Employing municipality-level data on electoral results, Sardine mobilization and far-right political events, we exploit a difference-in-differences design to identify the effect of local exposure to Sardine mobilization on the municipal electoral performance of far-right parties. The results suggest that local exposure to a Sardine event has a strong negative effect on far-right electoral results.

The paper builds on the puzzling re-emergence of far-right parties in Italy, a country where the fascist experience is recent and violent. It tries to shed some light on this puzzling phenomena by looking at the phenomenon from an original perspective, focusing on the determinants and implications of authoritarian nostalgia. I collected new survey data to better understand how widespread authoritarian nostalgia is, to understand the main determinants, and whether it is a consequential phenomena.