Climbing over the left-right cleavage : The impact of technocratic and grand coalition governments in Italy in a time of economic crisis

The worldwide economic crisis has had important political implications in many Western democracies. In Italy, where political competition has been largely structured along a deep left-right cleavage, the crisis brought two parliamentary coalitions that crossed this boundary: one supporting a technocratic government from November 2011 to December 2012, and a grand coalition government from April 2013. In this paper we discuss whether and how these two events had an impact on voters’ behavioural polarization, and how this affected patterns of inter-party competition. Did the grand coalitions help Italian citizens to overstep the psychological gap separating left and right parties? Or did they just contribute to voters' confusion and to the spread of anti-politics sentiment? Moreover, did the two coalitions have similar electoral implications, given that one of the two was in support of a technocratic government? We observe aggregate behavioural polarization by modelling two-by-two correlations between party propensity to vote (PTV) scores in a stacked data matrix. In this setting, anti-political attitudes are assessed by selecting citizens who show no propensity to vote for any of the relevant parties. We use repeated cross-sectional public opinion data covering a time period from March 2011 to March 2014. Preliminary results suggest a process of depolarization during the first coalition supporting the technocratic government in the period 2011-2012.