The Italian General Elections from a Southern European perspective: parties, voters and issues

The Italian political landscape stands out for ongoing transformations anticipating other European countries’ political changes. Over the last fifteen years, Italy has been marked by the emergence of new political formations, the consolidation of sovereignist/Eurosceptic parties, and a succession of external shocks, from renewed security threats to energy crises and the climate emergency. This panel reads the Italian general election as an instance of a broader process of recomposition. Three interrelated levels organize the discussion, moving from the issues around which parties compete to the parties themselves and finally to the voters.
At the level of issues, classic domestic issues such as immigration, the economy and security remain salient but are increasingly reframed through a sovereignist idiom centered on national control. International and economic developments, from defense commitments to energy and climate policy, press directly on parties that could once address them in vaguer terms, producing a heterogeneous competitive space, one in which allies converge on some issues and diverge sharply on others.
Parties, in turn, confront a coalition architecture that has grown fragile. Divisions among coalition partners, the disproportionate weight that medium-small formations can exercise within broader alliances, and new political actors that directly contest existing coalition boundaries. Leadership solidity varies considerably across this landscape, with some parties resting on consolidated leaderships and others structurally dependent on figures whose authority travels poorly.
Voters, finally, meet this fluid supply with responses of their own, positioning and repositioning across elections rather than anchoring to stable partisan identities. Whether and how issue ownership adjusts to this shifting landscape, and how the salience of security, economic, and international questions vary across the electorate, remain open empirical questions that complicate any simple mapping between party supply and electoral demand.
This panel welcomes papers addressing any of these three levels, individually or in combination, whether grounded in survey research, qualitative and case-based analysis, computational text analysis, or comparative party politics, and remains open more generally to a broad range of methodological traditions. Moreover, the panel invites papers addressing Italy as a single-case study, as well as in comparative terms, especially from a Southern European perspective.