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Public Choice

Erschienen in:

26.06.2020

The rise of populist parties in the aftermath of a massive corruption scandal

verfasst von: Alessandra Foresta

Erschienen in: Public Choice | Ausgabe 3-4/2020

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Abstract

Populism is on the rise in Europe and America, and understanding its origins and evolution is becoming increasingly important. In this study, I investigate the effects of the exposure of corruption scandals on populist parties in Italy, exploiting a novel dataset based on electoral data at the municipal level. I find that local corruption exposure helps the populist parties in national elections and hurts the incumbents as the scandals are revealed.

Vorheriger Artikel Birds of a feather flock together: trust in government, political selection and electoral punishment

Nächster Artikel Corruption predictability and corruption voting in Asian democracies

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To be precise, the name adopted by Northern League in the last elections simply was League.

The full names of the political parties are presented in “Appendix 1”. For simplicity, in the paper I use abbreviations and acronyms.

The recent work of Aassve et al. (2018) evaluates, among other things, the persistency of national corruption scandals on the rise of populist parties in the long run.

Other studies investigate the effects of corruption scandals on incumbents and find that incumbents are not always ousted automatically (Chang et al. 2010; Ferraz and Finan 2008; Peters and Welch 1980).

Tangentopoli was not the only cause of the meltdown in Italian politics. Other significant causes were the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in 1989, as well as the changes taking place in Italian society (Colazingari and Rose-Ackerman 1998).

Since 1946, Italy has had 29 prime ministers, 64 governments and 18 legislatures, rather than the 14 that would have been elected on 5-year cycles.

The general elections took place on April 5, 1992.

The Italian Parliament comprises two main chambers, Camera, the Lower Chamber, and Senato, the Upper Chamber.

The estimate is by Daniele et al. (2020), based on the work of Ceron and Mainenti (2015).

LAL was a left-wing regionalist political party, founded in 1992 and based in Lombardy.

Silvio Berlusconi was a well-known real estate and media entrepreneur who became the leading political figure in Italy for roughly two decades.

The most significant parties in the alliance were Lega Lombarda (Lombard League) and Liga Veneta (Venetian League), while the other parties included Piedmònt Autonomista (Autonomist Piedmont), Union Ligure (Ligurian Union), Lega Emiliano-Toscana (Emilian-Tuscan League) and Alleanza Toscana (Tuscan Alliance).

The only exception was Puglia, where technicalities prevented FI from taking part in the 1994 general elections

CCD comprised former DC politicians who opposed the party’s transformation into the Partito Popolare Italiano (Italian People’s Party, PPI) and advocated an alliance with FI.

The result includes only the vote for the Lower Chamber, because, owing to the electoral alliance, LN did not run candidates for parliament’s Upper Chamber.

A coalition comprising PDS, the parties of politicians who had been affiliated with the DC, such as Popolari per Prodi (People for Prodi, PPR) and other small left-wing parties.

Although the parties considered as populist in the present study are all right-wing parties, populism is not a priori connected with an ideology; left-wing populist parties also exist (see Latin America). As suggested by March (2012) and March and Mudde (2005), a “marriage of convenience” between populism and right-wing parties is observed in Europe.

The party was very small, with no more than 3582 votes in the national elections.

I also construct another variable using only the municipalities’ names to control for possible variations in municipalities’ media coverage. The two measures are strongly correlated, and no variation caused by media bias is evident.

Unfortunately, the data do not disentangle the two types of corruption.

The 1992 national elections are excluded because Tangentopoli was in its early stages. However, I also conduct the analysis after accounting for 1992; the results are analogous to those presented. They are available upon request.

Italy contains roughly 8100 municipalities. All municipalities that merged or separated during the period analyzed were excluded from the sample. Also excluded were a few outliers, along with municipalities with fewer than 50 inhabitants.

Overall, Italy has 20 regions and about 100 provinces. My analysis includes Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Veneto, Lombardia (Lombardy), Piemonte (Piedmont), Liguria, Toscana (Tuscany) and Emilia-Romagna. Two Northern regions, Valle D’Aosta (Aosta Valley) and Trentino-Alto Adige (Trentino-South Tyrol), are excluded because of the strong presence of ethnic minorities and of local regionalist and autonomist parties (e.g., South Tyrolean People’s Party in Trentino-South Tyrol and Valdostan Union in Aosta Valley).

Representing the only significant right-wing parties other than LN or FI.

The list was created by Lamberto Dini, a centrist politician and economist.

Provincial fixed effects are a set of dummies indicating specific provinces in different years.

Using the vote shares of different parties/coalitions as dependent variables helps me control for the effects of absenteeism (Giommoni 2017).

I also test the difference between the coefficients, and I find that the coefficient for LN is statistically different with respect to the other coefficients. The results available upon request.

To check whether my results are robust to endogeneity, I also implement a placebo test using post-election values of corruption. The results are consistent with the ones presented in Table 3. They are available upon request.

As suggested in Sect. 2, another characteristic of LN is regionalism/secessionism. Other parties with similar characteristics, such as LAL, were active in the period analyzed, but none was as successful as LN. The maximum vote share obtained by LAL, for example, was 2.12%.

The party later changed its name to Unione dei Democratici Cristiani e Democratici di Centro. For simplicity, in the paper I always refer to it as Christian Democratic Center and with the acronym CCD.

The Northern League changed its name in 1996 from Lega Nord per l’Indipendenza della Padania (“Northern League for the independence of Padania”). For simplicity, in the paper I always refer to it as the Northern League and with the acronym LN.

Its name was changed in 1995, but for the sake of simplicity the name AN is used throughout.

Democratic Party of the Left changed its name in 1998 and became Democratici di Sinistra (Left Democrats, DS). For simplicity, in the paper I always refer to it as Democratic Party of the Left and with the acronym PDS.

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Titel: The rise of populist parties in the aftermath of a massive corruption scandal
verfasst von: Alessandra Foresta
Publikationsdatum: 26.06.2020
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Public Choice / Ausgabe 3-4/2020
Print ISSN: 0048-5829
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7101
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-020-00826-1

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