Italy gained global attention this September when, in their first general election since 2018, they elected Fratelli d'Italia – a far right party considered neo-fascist by some – to a majority of seats in parliament. Many attribute Fratelli d’Italia’s success to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s populist rhetoric and her party’s appealing status as the standout opposition to the now-failed Draghi government. However, an underexplored explanation for the win of Fratelli d’Italia and the broader far-right coalition is Italian electoral law and its impact on coalition building.
Italian parliamentary coalitions have typically been short-lived and made up of volatile party alliances. Italy has had an unprecedented number of electoral reforms––five since World War II, which is significantly more than most other modern democracies. These reforms address nearly ever aspect of Italian elections. 2017 saw the most recent major change in Italian election law. By examining specific aspects and implications of the 2017 Rosatellum legislation (formally Rosatellum bis) and considering expert evaluations of recent Italian elections from the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI) dataset, we can put together the story of 2022’s winning coalition in the context of the new Italian electoral landscape.
Specifically, the 2018 national election saw a complex transformation of seat allocation in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate due to the changes from Rosatellum. Designed to foster political stability and strengthen coalitions, Rosatellum provided the electoral setup for Italy’s most conservative government in decades.
NEW SEAT ALLOCATION AND VOTE THRESHOLDS
In the last 70 years, Italy has alternated between allocating seats by pure proportional representation and by varying mixed electoral systems, but in the period between 2005 and 2017 the Italian parliament was elected through a fully proportional system. Rosatellum introduced a new mixed system in which 36% of seats are won via first-past-the-post elections in single-member districts and the other 64% of seats are allocated proportionally in multi-member districts. In proportionally-allocated districts, coalitions must submit closed candidate lists before the election. Additionally, parliamentarians in the Chamber of Deputies, Italy’s lower house, were previously elected through multiple rounds of elections conducted until one party reached a majority, but Rosatellum sets only one election round where the candidate with the most votes takes the seat.
Rosatellum also established new electoral thresholds to incentivise coalition formation. Before 2017, parties ran independently for proportionally-allocated seats, and coalitions were not allowed on the ballot. To compensate for this, an automatic majority of seats was awarded to any party that won over 40% of the national vote. Rosatellum eliminated this, and now requires parties and coalitions to receive over 50% of the vote. Additionally, parties need to receive at least 3% of the overall vote and coalitions need to receive at least 10% to be in contention for proportionally-allocated seats.
Figure 1: Election fairness indicies measured by PEI data from Italy. Each variable presented has a minimum possible value of 1 and a maximum possible value of 5.
By changing seat allocation procedures and setting these thresholds for parties––and more importantly, for coalitions––small parties that coalesce with more mainstream parties became even more crucial than before. The increased importance of smaller parties is reflected in post-election data from the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Index, compiled by the Electoral Integrity Project. PEI data, collected through post-election expert surveys, indicate that in Italy, there was a notable increase in the fairness of electoral laws toward smaller parties between the 2013 national election and the 2018 national election, shown in Figure 1.
In 2013, expert assessment showed smaller parties had more of an electoral disadvantage than under the Rosatellum law. It appears that Rosatellum had a positive impact on coalition building, as measured by the increased access of small parties to government. This was a step toward greater electoral integrity in Italy and one with immediate political impacts.
The importance of small party support limited the pool of viable coalitions in 2022. Partito Democratico, one of Italy’s most prominent parties, struggled to repair fractured relationships with once-allied parties on the left. This was crucial to their electoral success because of two other aspects of Rosatellum: the requirement of pre-election coalition declarations and the elimination of split-ticket voting.
COALITION DECLARATION AND SPLIT-TICKET VOTING ELIMINATION
Rosatellum established a form of closed list voting in which parties both decide the set lists of candidates and can formally nominate the same candidate as other members of the coalition. Voters then choose to cast their ballots either for a specific candidate (and thus their national vote is cast for the party or coalition that nominated that candidate) or cast their ballots for a party (and thus their district vote is cast for the candidate nominated by the party or broader coalition). However, Rosatellum completely eliminated ticket-splitting, or voting for different parties on the same ballot. Specifically, Italian voters must vote for the same party or coalition for both district seats (where they are voting for a specific candidate) and in the national-level vote on the same ballot. As expected, this trend was evident in PEI data from 2018. When comparing 2013 to 2018, experts agreed with the statement “only top party leaders selected candidates” more strongly under the Rosatellum than prior Italian election law, indicating an decline in electoral integrity[1]. Figure 2 shows just how much lower Italy scores on this question than the rest of the region, especially considering its score on the full PEI index.
Figure 2: Overall electoral integrity index compared to ‘Only top party leaderes selected candidates’ variable from PEI_8.0. Both variables reflect the most recent national election as of April 2022 for the 115 counties assessed by the dataset. The variable measuring leaders’ role in candidate selection has a minimum possible value of 1 and a mximumum possible value of 5, with higher values denoting higher integrity. The PEI index has a minimum possible value of 0 and a maximum possible value of 100.
Figure 2 positions the 115 countries included in the PEI dataset on a scatterplot where each country’s electoral integrity index value (0-100) is displayed on the x-axis and the country’s score on the variable measing party leaders’ level of influence over the selection of candidates (1-5) is displayed on the y-axis. Compared to Italy’s score on the overall index, Italy has a very low score of leaders’ role in candidate selection (and thus lower level of integrity). On this variable, Italy scores similarly to nations with much lower values for overall electoral integrity, such as Banglasesh, Syria, and Venezuela.
These electoral changes have made pre-election coalitions vital to success on election day: if two or more parties can agree to declare a coalition and formally nominate the same candidates, they can capitalize on the new majoritarianism by which a significant number of seats are allocated.
This is exactly what happened in 2022. Partito Democratico failed to form a coalition with Movimento 5 Stelle, Azione, or Italia Viva, despite the fact that, if formally together on the ballot, the center left coalition was projected to capture a similar percentage of the national vote as the right-wing coalition, according to pre-election polls. However, these parties could not agree to run together, and instead, Partito Democratico, Movimento 5 Stelle, and the Azione-Italia Viva coalition each ran their own candidates instead of unifying behind a common candidate in each district.
In contrast, the right-wing alliance of Fratelli d’Italia, Forza Italia, and Lega, which differ very little in party platform, unified behind a single candidate from one of the right-wing parties in every district. That is to say, there was only one conservative option on the ballot in any district, whereas there were many more liberal candidates to choose from, thus diluting votes for the left since the party of the candidate with the most votes wins. With the new majoritarian seat allocation, barring one extremely popular party, the only way to be in contention for government control was through formalized pre-election coalitions. Though Partito Democratico, Movimento 5 Stelle, and the Azione-Italia Viva coalition (the liberal parties) actually received a larger percentage of votes overall in the country, they failed to secure the first-past-the-post seats required to take control of the Italian government. The three right-wing parties were able to coalesce in an alliance that allowed their dominance in majoritarian races.
In 2022, the electoral reforms introduced by Rosatellum gave Italy’s right-wing parties a significant advantage. Ultimately, Fratelli d’Italia and their coalition capitalized on the particulars of recent electoral reform through a combination of strategy and good old-fashioned luck.
Rosatellum’s critics argue that coalition incentives aren’t enough to build political stability in Italy, since parties, as they assert, will continue to form unstable alliances that threaten to implode. Compared to the global average, recent Italian elections have been clean, free, and fair, and there doesn’t appear to be an active threat to Italian democracy in light of current electoral law or the right-wing wave. However, more years of political instability and constant reform might reduce Italian voters’ faith in the quality and representative nature of their own elections.
Only time will tell how long Meloni’s government can stay in power, though her coalition comfortably won in recent regional elections. Whenever the next national election is held, coalitions and the electoral law that governs them will still play a fundamental role in who leads Italy.
[1] Question 5-4b. of PEI 8.0 asks for agreement with the statement “Only top party leaders selected candidates.” This is the reversed coding of the previous question (5-4a.) such that higher values denote higher electoral integrity.
Ansley Langham is an undergraduate student at Emory University, Atlanta.