Geographical context, interest in politics and voting behaviour: the case of the Northern League in Italy

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between political involvement (namely, interest in political issues) and context in explaining voting behaviour with regard to the Northern League (NL), an Italian regionalist party. The basis of the paper’s theoretical argument is the differentiation between core (or more attentive) and peripheral (or less attentive) voters, conceptualised in classical works on voting behaviour. According to Campbell, peripheral voters – those who are less involved in politics and election campaigns – tend to be less certain about their voting choices and, thus, are more prone to be swung towards the dominant party. In the case of a regionalist party, it is hypothesised that less attentive voters evaluate party strength contextually – that is, according to the strength of the party’s roots in localities. Following this theoretical approach, it is possible to hypothesise that less involved voters will tend to evaluate parties according to their local strength, while it is likely that the more interested segment of the electorate tends to deviate from this kind of group loyalty. Moreover, we will explore whether these effects are heightened in electoral contexts that favour the regionalist party itself. More specifically, multivariate regression models will be applied to the 2006 elections, when the League gained about 4% of the vote; and to the 2008 elections, when it almost doubled its share, mostly because of non-contextual factors. This effect will be tested by means of multivariate linear regression on two subsequent elections employing Italian National Election Study (ITANES) data.