One country, two populist parties: Voting patterns of the 2018 Italian elections and their determinants

The results of the elections have increasingly brought to the forefront the long-standing issue of lagging regions—also labelled as “places that don't matter”—since they had a great influence on the electoral outcomes. In this paper, we focus on the municipal results of the Italian senate elections, held in March 2018. Italy is a peculiar country where two non-traditional parties, namely “Lega” and “Movimento 5 Stelle” (M5S), ended up forming the government coalition running until August 2019 and competing for different shades of populism. Our aim is to investigate the regional characteristics which underlie the local preferences for the two non-mainstream parties. First, we find that the spatial distribution of their votes is associated with territorial socio-economic and institutional differences, and hence that Lega and M5S are characterized by a different electoral base (e.g., Lega capitalized its traditional support in the North, while M5S won especially in the South). Second, beyond these expected regional patterns, our evidence also highlights a sharp urban-rural contrast.