Suchergebnisse

In 1970, a new institutional arena for interpolitical party competition was introduced in Italy with the creation of fifteen regions. This paper aims at developing the topic of territorial differentiation of the Italian party system. It highlights facets & features of regional party arenas through a comparison between these arenas & the national system. Five systemic properties are taken into account: fragmentation, concentration, competitiveness, net volatility, & regionalism of voting behavior. The various indexes measuring these dimensions have been computed from both regional & national election results. It appears that a general nondifferentiation between local & national arenas has occurred, with a few relevant exceptions. Also investigated is whether these properties & the pattern of regional voting have undergone any significant change during the transition from the so-called "first" to the "second" Italian Republic. Some distinctive cases &, overall, four clusters of local party systems are identified, & some hypotheses concerning the reasons for the emergence of the various patterns are offered. Notably, a "personal factor" in several southern regions may be regarded as relevant. 7 Tables, 3 Appendixes, 47 References. Adapted from the source document.

The article provides a systematic test of the consequences of the electoral system for the format of the party system & the frequency of single-party majority cabinets. The test is based on Lijphart's 1994 data set (extended from 1990 to 1 Nov 2002), but excludes some of his cases, & introduces an additional indicator of the number of parties. Thanks to these changes in the research design, the variance explained by multivariate regression is much higher than Lijphart's results, especially as long as the elective parties (ie, the psychological effects of the electoral system) are concerned. At the same time, the post-1990 data show a decline of the predictive power of the main independent variable ("effective" threshold). In order to explain this decline, the author argues that the growing destructuration of Western parties & party systems occurring since the early 1990s should be taken into account. Indeed, entering into the regression an indicator of such a process (total net volatility) compensates for most of the threshold's lost explanatory power, thus suggesting that destructuration is a far more significant variable than previously recognized by the relevant literature. 11 Tables, 27 References. Adapted from the source document.