Faraway, so close: a spatial account of the Conte I government formation in Italy, 2018

The formation of the ‘yellow-green’ government that took office in Italy after the general election held on 4 March 2018 looked puzzling to many commentators as the two coalition partners – the Five Star Movement and the League – appeared to be quite distant on the left–right continuum. In this article, we argue that despite being widely used in the literature, a unidimensional representation of parties' policy positions on the encompassing left–right scale is inadequate to explain the process of coalition governments' formation. We focus first on coalition outcomes in Italy in the period 2001–18. Our statistical analysis including, among other variables, parties' policy distance on the left–right dimension performs rather well until 2013 but fails to predict the coalition outcome in 2018. To solve the puzzle, we propose a two-dimensional spatial account of the Conte I government formation in which the first dimension coincides with the economic left–right and the second one is related to immigration, the European Union issues and social conservatism. We show that the coalition outcome ceases to be poorly understandable once parties' policy positions are measured along these two dimensions, rather than on the general left–right continuum.