The local elections of 2021. Voting in the large cities

The 2021 round of Italian local elections involved a total of 1,339 municipalities. However, the attention of political leaders and the media was almost entirely focused on the competitions in the five largest cities (Rome, Milan, Naples, Turin and Bologna) which were seen as a national political test. The media placed the greatest emphasis on suggestions that the results were a surprising victory for the centre left, marking an important shift in the electoral balance of power between the parties. This article documents the extent of this ‘victory’, examines what was responsible for it and considers its possible effects on politics at the national level. The analysis is based on a new dataset created by the Cattaneo Institute which allows a spatial analysis of voting within each city for all elections over a period of more than twenty years. This allows us to examine not only voting trends over time, but also how votes have been distributed in the different areas of each city with their different levels of socio-economic well-being. In doing so, the article contributes to the literature on the spatial divergence of voting behaviour by showing that the increasing divergence between larger/urban and smaller/rural centres, and that between central and peripheral (more disadvantaged) areas within large cities, cannot be linked to the same explanatory factors, as their timing is different.