Il paper di Mariano Cavataio e Stefano Camatarri sarà presentato alla 65esima Political Studies Association (PSA) Annual International Conference che si terrà a Sheffield (Gran Bretagna) il 30 marzo e l'1 aprile 2015.
Titolo del panel
The party of the leader - personalisation of political leadership in Italy: what consequences for parties & party systems?
Chairs: Arianna Giovannini (Leeds Metropolitan University) e Jim Newell (University of Salford).
Il panel è organizzato dallo standing group Italian Politics Specialist Group.
Titolo del saggio
Leaders as cognitive shortcuts: the role of
reliability ratings in voting behavior at the 2014 European
elections
Abstract
The trend
towards the personalization and presidentialisation of politics seems to have
become (in Italy, Europe and Advanced Western democracies) a response
to the decline of party identification and party mobilization, with increasing
consequences of partisan dealignment. After
all, at the level of party politics, we are in the era of parties without partisans (Dalton
and Wattenberg 2000; Scarrow 2000).
However,
examining the triumph of the "Renzi's Party" at the 2014 European elections only through the lens of the
personalization of politics is not enough. In fact, ideological factors such as
the left-right ideological dimension still matter in the Italian electoral
context (Itanes 2013; Salvati 2014). Moreover, any dealignment is often followed by a subsequent realignment between parties and voters in any democratic context
(Wenzel and Inglehart 2011).
All this lead
us to conceptualize leaders not
simply as a synthesis of personal traits and characteristics, but also as cognitive shortcuts that encourage
political judgements and decisions (Sniderman, Brody and Tetlock 1991). Within
such interpretative framework, this paper is aimed at investigating how Italian voters were
differentiated in adopting specific representations
of the political competition in the last European elections.
Reliability ratings of the leaders by the voters will be crucial under this
point of view. Once established that voters use
their ratings towards leaders as a kind of
heuristic, we will test the extent to which such information is able to work as
a summary measure of different representations of the political debate.
Moreover, we will make use of survey data in order to
understand whether and how such element was related to voting behavior in the
context of the last European elections. Ultimately, we expect from the analysis the confirmation
of the existence of different rating patterns within the electorate, of which we will try to reconstruct the general features and
mechanisms of development.
