The Stability of Communist Electorates: Evidence from a Longitudinal Analysis of French and Italian Aggregate Data

Abstract

In both France and Italy, research on communism has mainly focused on the Communist parties' structures of command and on their doctrinal adaptation; much less attention has been given to their structures of support, and-in particular-to their capacity to find supporters for an aggressive social strategy. Reasoning from a model of voting stability which emphasizes the need for voter continuity in parties of mass mobilization, like the Communist party, we compare the French and Italian parties along two indices of voting stability: first, an index of overall electorate volatility; and second, an index of internal electoral fluidity. Using electoral statistics over a series of five or six national elections at the communal level in Italy and at the cantonal level in France, we compare the scores of the PCI and PCF along these two measures and demonstrate what appears to be a greater potential for mass mobilization in the electorate of the Italian party, a potential-it should be added-which seems to contrast with the differences in the two parties' structures of command, and with the differences in the revolutionary will of their respective leaderships.