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Mapping populism -- Should we stay or should we go? : European immigration, globalization, and Brexit -- Reality bites : the unexpected victory of Donald Trump -- Steps forward and one step back? : Marine le Pen and the National Front in France -- When in Rome...populism and the Five Star movement in Italy.

A richly informed new explanation for the rise and fall of Italy's colorful prime minister.

Much has been written about why the old Italian party system collapsed in the early 1990s, and the various features of the one that replaced it, such as the mixed electoral system and the emergence of the regionalist party, the Northern League. Relatively little research attempts to show how old parties were replaced as the system collapsed from 1987 to 1994, and as the subsequent system emerged and consolidated between 1992 and 2001. This paper uses spatial analysis to examine the geographical pattern of support for the fading and rising parties to show how the old Italian party system was replaced. Instead of seeing the geography of voting as a reflection of underlying social cleavages, on the assumption that new parties would just slot into the electoral 'spaces' of the old ones, we see it as a useful diagnostic that can inform how one set of parties is replaced by another. [Copyright 2006 Elsevier Ltd.]

ObjectiveWe examined whether stable, county-level, voter preferences were significantly associated with county-level obesity prevalence using data from the 2012 US Presidential election. County voting preference for the 2012 Republican Party presidential candidate was used as a proxy for voter endorsement of personal responsibility approaches to reducing population obesity risk versus approaches featuring government-sponsored, multi-sectoral efforts like those recommended by the Centers for Disease Control Centers for Disease Control (CDC, 2009).MethodCartographic visualization and spatial analysis were used to evaluate the geographic clustering of obesity prevalence rates by county, and county-level support for the Republican Party candidate in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. The spatial analysis informed the spatial econometric approach employed to model the relationship between political preferences and other covariates with obesity prevalence.ResultsAfter controlling for poverty rate, percent African American and Latino populations, educational attainment, and spatial autocorrelation in the error term, we found that higher county-level obesity prevalence rates were associated with higher levels of support for the 2012 Republican Party presidential candidate.ConclusionFuture public health efforts to understand and reduce obesity risk may benefit from increased surveillance of this and similar linkages between political preferences and health risks.