Dal PD nascente di Veltroni al PD secondo Matteo di Renzi : trasformazione di un partito politico (2007-2015)

This article aims at understanding the political transformation of the Italian Partito Democratico (PD) in the last eight years. In order to comprehend if the secretary of the party Matteo Renzi has been changing both the political supply and the core beliefs of PD, we take into consideration different faces in which it is possible observe a change in the political positioning. Thus, we analyse preferences and attitudes of a sample of PD party delegates surveyed in PD National Assemblies of 2007, 2009 and 2013. The first face is the self-positioning of PD’s ruling class: we discover that from 2007 there has been a light centre-leaning repositioning of the dominant coalition on the left/right ideological axis and an increase in the degree of internal polarization among factions. Secondly, we investigate which policy issues are able to determine ruling class members’ positioning on the left/right axis and whether in this second face there has also been a repositioning of the PD. We develop a linear regression model on self-positioning in order to evaluate how relevant three policy areas are (the economic area, the religious area and the etic/moral one). Thus we proceed with a logistic regression analysis to evaluate if attitudes of delegates toward many policy issues are able to explain the support of the majorities that controlled or have been controlling the party since 2007 until present. We observe how a more liberal position on economic issues predicts a higher probability to support Matteo Renzi, while the opposite relationship characterizes Bersani’s and Veltroni’s majorities. The results of the analysis of the two faces quoted above are also confirmed by the study of the political space constructed through a principal component analysis. Finally, we take into consideration the importance of values. Following the theoretical path of Schwartz, we have constructed two different dimensions of analysis: individual values (such as market and competition) and collective values (like labour and equality). The position of majorities and factions on both axes shows there is a change in values preferences through time from a collective-value-oriented position to an individual-value-oriented position.