L'apocalisse della democrazia Italiana. All'origine di due terremoti elettorali, Hans Schadee, Paolo Segatti and Cristiano Vezzoni. Bologna: il Mulino, 2019. 170p. €16,00 (hardcover)

L’apocalisse della democrazia italiana by Hans Schadee, Paolo Segatti and Cristiano Vezzoni aims to provide a wide range of potential beneficiaries – students, journalists, and, of course, academics – with a deep analysis of the reasons behind the two electoral ‘earthquakes’ that occurred in the last two Italian general elections (in 2013 and 2018). The authors – leading experts in electoral behaviour – consider the electoral turmoil that occurred in Italy between 2013 and 2018 not as a ‘normal’ electoral change, but as a deep systemic crisis, which occurred in two steps during the 2013–2018 electoral cycle. In this regard, most studies have addressed two issues separately: the collapse of both pivotal mainstream parties of the political system of the so-called Second Republic – Democratic Party (Pd) and People of Freedom/Go Italy (Pdl/Forza Italia) – and the success of challenger parties such as the Five Star Movement (M5s) and the new League (Lega) of Matteo Salvini. This book, conversely, aims to jointly analyse the two issues, trying to understand how the electoral collapse of Pd and Pdl/Forza Italia translated into consensus for M5s and Lega. To explain the uncommon nature of the 2013 and 2018 elections, several possible explanations have been proposed in the literature. On the one hand, the reaction of voters to the epochal transformations of our times was invoked: first, the effects of the Great Recession, globalization or the migration crisis would have changed voters’ positions on specific issues related to these socio-structural transformations; then, this attitudinal change would have changed their habitual voting choices. This perspective, widely shared in the Italian public debate, focuses on the reasons for the success of M5s and Lega, that is, on the ‘factors of attraction’, to use the words of Schadee, Segatti and Vezzoni. On the other, some accurate studies focused on very specific (albeit quite idiosyncratic) factors to explain the electoral collapse of both mainstream parties (Pd and Forza Italia) in the 2018 general election. In the case of Pd, for example, attention has been paid to the policies implemented by the government led by Matteo Renzi. In the case of Forza Italia, the collapse is attributed to senescence and the lack of replacement of Silvio Berlusconi’s leadership in the centre–right camp. Although recognizing the importance of both types of explanations, the authors show a feeling of dissatisfaction with them: indeed, the ‘global’ perspective does not fully explain the specificity of the Italian political crisis and does not consider the role of those who exercise political authority, while ‘local’ interpretations are generic in identifying what the authors call the ‘repulsive factors’ that have led millions of voters to sanction both pivotal parties of the Second Republic. This book tries to overcome the limits of these perspectives by proposing an appealing framework based on longitudinal micro-level analyses to properly study the individual voting shifts and the reasons behind this electoral change, focusing on the contribution of both ‘attraction’ and ‘repulsion’ factors.