Italy, the fair land there where the Sì doth sound: when the places take revenge

This article provides empirical evidence on the determinants of the vote in favour of reducing the number of the Members of Parliament, the issue covered by Italy’s referendum held on 20–21 September 2020. Consistent with the literature on the geography of discontent, the social factors – age, education and income – play a significant role. Among the determinants, however, the political factor stands out, namely the vote for the Five Star Movement in the 2018 elections. This study applies a place-based approach, in which the unit of analysis is the Local Labour System, a socio-economic territorial unit that embeds the vote in the places where people’s lives actually occur. Therefore, local communities become protagonists of the vote, which in this occurrence, is an anti-political-establishment vote because they feel left behind by policy and politics.