Right-wing Victory in the 2022 Italian Parliamentary Election: Territorial Patterns and Systemic Implications

: The snap election held in September 2022 saw the victory of the right-wing coalition, with a remarkable performance of the populist radical right party Fratelli d’Italia and its leader, Giorgia Meloni, who has become the first female Prime Minister of the country. Another unprecedented element concerns participation, which was the lowest in post-war Italy for a national election. Throughout this article, we first shed light on the background of this election, by highlighting how the specificities of the electoral system and previous developments during the last legislature affected the strategic coordination of political parties. We then proceed to the illustration of the results, with a territorial analysis of participation figures, vote share and competitiveness of electoral constituencies. Finally, we assess the implications of this election for the institutionalization of the party system. What emerges is a picture of growing abstention, disproportionality, fragmentation and electoral volatility, which suggests an overall consolidation of instability.


Introduction
The 2022 Italian election was called before the end of a turbulent legislature, during which the country witnessed the alternation of three different cabinets. Despite the rushed electoral campaign conducted over the summer, the dilemma of which alliances should be formed and the uncertainty about the effects of the electoral system after the significant reduction in the number of MPs, the results have confirmed the prediction of the polls. The right-wing coalition 1 prevailed, bolstered in particular by the impressive result of the populist radical right party Fratelli d'Italia (FdI, Brothers of Italy) -whose leader, Giorgia Meloni, swore in as the head of a new government one month after the election.
Throughout this article, we aim at understanding better the territorial differences in electoral outcomes and to assess the impact of this election on the Italian party system. The first section is devoted to the description of the political context in which the election took place and in particular the strategic coordination of parties in response to the incentives of the electoral law. In the second section, we illustrate the results by party and electoral coalition.
We present national and provincial figures for abstention -which was at its highest in postwar Italy in general elections -and then we examine the overall results and the territorial patterns of voting, by focusing on larger geographical areas, but also on electoral districts and municipalities.
The third and last section aims at assessing to what extent the election results have affected the overall party system. By selecting four key indicators of party system institutionalization (Casal Bértoa & Enyedi, 2021;Casal Bértoa, 2023), we detect higher levels of volatility, fragmentation and disproportionality, among others. These elements contribute to a picture of consolidated instability, with a large share of the electorate deeply disaffected and prone to vote switching. In the conclusion, we summarise the main implications of the election for the country. 1 We will refer to this coalition as "right-wing" rather than "centre-right", given that in 2022 the weight of the right-wing parties -Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) and Lega (League) -made the former label much more suitable than the latter (see also Chiaramonte et al., 2023).

2.
The context of the election

A Parliament in turmoil
The XVIII legislature of the Italian Parliament (2018-2022) mirrored the deinstitutionalization of the country's party system (Chiaramonte and Emanuele 2014;. Born in the context of a hung parliament, it has seen the takeover of three cabinets with (very) different ideological mix-ups, an unprecedented event in the so- Renzi, who earlier that month had left the PD to form his own party, Italia Viva (IV, Italy Alive). Only a few months later, the second Conte cabinet was confronted with the Covid-19 emergency, responding with several containment measures. After an initial phase in which also opposition parties showed relative unity in the face of the emergency (Albertazzi et al., 2021), the right-wing parties -Fratelli d'Italia and Lega in particular -became vocally critical of the government on the most important issues related to the management of the pandemic, such as the closure of the economic activities, mask and vaccine mandates.
2 Although it had happened that three or more cabinets alternated in power during the same legislature, this was the first time that the three parliamentary majorities presented different ideological mix-ups. In the 1996-2001 legislature, for instance, the four governments were basically an expression of the then centre-left coalition -albeit with important changes between the first and the following three -while in 2013-2018 the three cabinets were all led by the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party) in an alliance with centre-right parties.
Tensions erupted quickly also among government parties, in particular between Italia Viva and the rest of the coalition. Already in the late Spring of 2020, Renzi's party criticised the government for the management of the economic consequences of the pandemic. Italia Viva then pushed the government to accept the special funds coming from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), a proposal to which the M5S was opposed (Cavatorto et al., 2021 In such a scenario, the electoral campaign was not so much about who would have won the election, but rather how large the parliamentary majority of the right-wing coalition would have been. On the opposite front, the three blocks instead sought to lose as little as possible, in order to maintain the party leadership (Letta), keep the party electorally alive (Conte), or be decisive in the event of future realignments (Calenda and Renzi).

Participation and abstention: the sub-national and territorial level
Participation in this end-of-summer snap election was at a record low ( Figure 1).
National turnout reached 63.9%, which is not only the lowest in the post-war history of the country but also corresponds to the largest drop in participation between consecutive elections (Garzia, 2022), with a decrease of around 9 percentage points. In addition to participation, an additional element worth analysing is the combination of blank and invalid votes. As reported in Figure 2, the share of blank and invalid ballots in the 2022 election was 1.1% and 1.7% of the whole electorate, respectively. This corresponds to a non-negligible increase compared to 2018 and can be connected to growing sentiments of disaffection among Italian voters (Chiaramonte, 2023). To sum up these data, for the first time less than two-thirds of the eligible voters (61%) cast a valid ballot in the election.
Source: authors' elaboration based on Ministry of the Interior data. Abroad constituency not included. Figure 3 explores the evolution of the turnout in the general elections of the so-called Second Republic, according to geo-political macro-areas. 5 It was obtained through a ratio 5 More than geographical divisions, such areas refer to different territorial political subcultures (Diamanti, 2010;Trigilia, 1981 between the turnout in such areas and the national score. As in the past, for instance, the South performed much worse than the other areas, where we find results either in line with the national level (Centre-South) or higher than that (former Red Zone and Northern regions).
Moreover, in 2022 this gap was accentuated compared to the past.
Source: authors' elaboration based on Ministry of the Interior data. Abroad constituencies not included.
This pattern is evident from the map on the left side of Figure 4, showing the participation rates in the 2022 election, at the provincial level. This helps us provide an even more fine-grained analysis compared to research looking at macro-areas. We notice that turnout was overall higher in the North, especially in Emilia Romagna (around 71%), followed by Lombardy, Veneto and Tuscany, slightly below 70%. Conversely, the South witnessed markedly lower participation, especially in Calabria and Sardinia, two regions where the turnout was just over 50% of votes. This trend is shown also in the map in the right panel of Figure 4, where the results of 2022 are compared to those of 2018. We can see severe drops in participation in most of the South. An exception is Sicily, where the national election was paired with the regional one, thus encouraging higher turnout rates (or at least, lower losses compared to previous elections).

The results
As long announced by the polls (see Garzia, 2022), the clear winner of the election was the right-wing coalition and in particular Giorgia Meloni, whose party Fratelli d'Italia gained The overall performance of the right-wing coalition in the single-member constituencies was remarkable: it won more than 82% of the SMCs for the lower Chamber and just under 80% for the Senate. Despite a difference of more than 10% of votes, the centre-left and the M5S won a similar number of SMCs for the Chamber of Deputies -10 vs. 12 -and the Senate -5 vs 6. Finally, Azione-Italia Viva did not win any SMC, but only seats in the proportional part. Table 1 summarizes these results for the Chamber of Deputies (above) and the Senate (below). Figure 5 shows the percentage of seats obtained by the winning pre-electoral alliance 7 since the election of 1994, starting year of the so-called Second Republic, when the formation of pre-election alliances became constant. We can see that for the first time since 2008 a preelectoral coalition obtained the absolute majority in both Chambers. Moreover, the share of seats of the right-wing coalition in 2022 is the highest obtained by a pre-electoral alliance in both chambers. Interestingly, the majority obtained by the right-wing coalition is quite similar 6 It must be noted that in 2022 the coalition was different compared to 2018, since four years earlier the centreleft did not include some leftist parties that run with the list Liberi e Uguali. At the same time, in 2018 it was led by Matteo Renzi, a rival of the centre-left coalition in 2022. 7 The data for the first two elections consider the total seats won by the centre-right (1994) and the centre-left (1996). Although these coalitions did not run those elections under the same pre-electoral alliance, but rather with different formulas, we have grouped them since the presentation of candidatures in the SMCs was generally agreed among the parties composing each coalition.

Territorial distribution of the vote
After looking at the national results, we can examine the territorial differences in party performances. In Figure 6 we have a measure of the nationalisation of the vote for the main parties in this election. We selected the parties within the main coalitions that got at least 1% of the votes, plus M5S and A-IV. We present the results for the Party System Nationalization Score (standardised and weighted), a measure introduced by Bochsler (2010) based on the Gini coefficient of parties' share at the sub-national level. It could theoretically range from 0 (complete absence of nationalisation) to 1 (party vote perfectly nationalised). 8 Two parties stand out immediately. First, Fratelli d'Italia was the most nationalised party in the election. This finding puts FdI rather in continuity with its 2018 results, but represents a shift from its political tradition -especially compared to former parties with which FdI has deep historical ties (Puleo and Piccolino, 2022), namely Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement) and Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance). According to the historical data of such scores, the former was never one of the most nationalised parties of the system, while the latter had mixed results over time (Kollman et al., 2019), specifically due to their better performances in the Centre-South and South of the country (Ignazi, 1998). The Movimento 5  In Table 2 we can further explore the results of each party, by single macro-area. FdI greatly increased its share in all macro-areas compared to 2018, in particular in the Northern regions. Conversely, its allies lost votes in all macro-areas and presented a rather distinct electoral geography: FI had its best results in the South, while the Lega performed better in the North. However, the Lega lost less in the Southern regions compared to the other areas. In other words, as we have also seen in Figure 6, the party became more nationalised while losing votes.
The winning coalition increased its vote share in all macro-areas, from a minimum gain of 4.2% in the North-West to a maximum of 10.1% in the Centre-South.
The centre-left slightly increased its vote share in each macro-area, but such gains were not enough to prevail in any of them. Significantly, the distance from the right-wing coalition has grown in every macro-area, including the former Red Zone. The electoral decline of the M5S has not affected all macro-areas in the same way: it was particularly sharp in the Northern regions, while in the South the party was able to limit the damages. As a result, while this area accounts for roughly 27% of total votes, the proportion of M5S votes coming from the South reaches 52.6% (compared to 42.5% in 2018). Fratelli d'Italia was the largest party in the majority of SMCs, 86 out of 147 (Table 3), while its allies obtained this result only in one SMC (with Forza Italia). The strength of the M5S in the South was remarkable: the party came in first place in most of the SMCs of that area. As a result, despite a lower national vote share compared to the PD, the M5S came in first place in more SMCs: 36 for the M5S, just 19 for the PD. Source: authors' elaboration based on Ministry of the Interior data.
In Figure 7 below we present further data regarding the prevalence of Fratelli d'Italia within the right-wing coalition. Meloni's party outperformed its coalition partners combined in 134 out of 146 SMCs. However, as a demonstration of the relatively homogeneous territorial distribution of this party, it obtained more than 30% of the votes in only 37 of them, and in none did it exceed 40%. Finally, we calculated that in 59 SMCs Fratelli d'Italia outperformed not only its allies taken together, but also the centre-left coalition and the other parties. This finding is interesting because candidates belonging to FdI won fewer SMCs (49) in the Chamber of Deputies. Of course, we cannot infer from these data how many seats FdI would have won in the (very hypothetical) case it had run alone, but they show how much the size of the party's victory had been underestimated also during the negotiations for the joint candidatures of the right-wing coalition. 9 Source: authors' elaboration based on Ministry of the Interior data.
The overwhelming prevalence of the right-wing coalition across the peninsula is clearly  The highest percentages for M5S were reached in Campania, Puglia and Calabria -as is visible in Figure 11. The M5S obtained more than 20% in all Southern SMCs except one, while it reached 10% in only twelve SMCs in the North-West and none in the North-East.
Moreover, the M5S got more than 40% of votes in five SMCs -a result that no other individual party achieved. In 2018, the M5S was instead able to win a large majority of the SMCs in the South and some also in other macro-areas (Emanuele & Vassallo, 2018).
Finally, the territorial distribution of Azione-Italia Viva (Figure 12) is quite similar to that of the centre-left coalition. Indeed, the share obtained by A-IV in the SMCs has a nonnegligible positive correlation with that of the centre-left coalition (Pearson's r=0.62) and a rather impressive one with +Europa, a party largely similar in terms of ideological placement (Pearson's r=0.82). As we can see from Table 6, no other pair of parties enjoys such a high level of correlation, even though there are other interesting associations, such as the positive correlation between FdI and Lega.
As an earlier analysis (Vassallo & Vegetti, 2022) showed, the sum of votes of the centre-left coalition and Azione-Italia Viva outperformed the right-wing coalition only in 14 additional SMCs. These two actors share indeed many of their areas of strength -former Red Zone and metropolitan areas. For example, out of the 18 SMCs in which Azione-Italia Viva obtained more than 10% of votes, 7 had already been won by the centre-left coalition.
Moreover, the 4 SMCs where A-IV had its best results were all won by the centre-left coalition.   Overall, the territorial distribution of the vote for each coalition is therefore rather distinctive, with the centre-left retrenched in some parts of the former Red Zone and large urban centres and the M5S in the South -against a background of the predominance of the right-wing coalition in the large part of the country.
A further level to explore is that of municipalities, in order to assess the extent to which the urban-rural divide affected the results of the parties. For such analysis, we rely on the classification of Italian comuni (municipalities) made by the Agenzia per la Coesione Territoriale (Agency for Territorial Cohesion) in the framework of the Strategia Nazionale Aree Interne (SNAI, National Strategy for Internal Areas), with some modifications. 11 This classification has the advantage of not merely relying on the population size of the sub-units, but rather taking into account the presence of or distance from public services and crucial infrastructure. Accordingly, Table 7 displays the vote share obtained by the main parties by municipal category; the darker shades of grey indicate results above the national share, and the lighter ones those below.
Support for the centre-left parties and Azione-Italia Viva show quite clearly how those actors performed better in more central municipalities. Conversely, Forza Italia and Lega performed better outside the main centres. Fratelli d'Italia shows a rather homogeneous distribution among the various categories. Meloni's party as well performed below its national share in most central municipalities, but the same happens also in the more peripheral ones. Instead, its best percentages were obtained in a "Middle Italy" of urban belt and intermediate municipalities. Finally, the M5S also has a rather homogeneous distribution, with no clear trend across the different categories. Breaking down this analysis by macro-areas, we see (Table 8) that the centre-left parties and Azione-Italia Viva, on the one hand, and Forza Italia and Lega, on the other, tend to replicate the national trend, albeit with some exceptions. Fratelli d'Italia shows instead a more complex picture.
In the North-West and the former Red Zone, its vote share tends to increase as the centrality of the municipality decreases, but the same does not happen in the other areas, where the party confirms its strength in intermediate categories. Finally, the Movimento 5 Stelle has its electoral strongholds in major cities and the urban belt of the South.

Competitiveness and Contestability
All in all, is this electoral geography stable over time? Italy's high degree of electoral volatility (Chiaramonte & Emanuele, 2013; enables changes in voting behaviour that may shift the territorial distribution of the vote. It seems therefore appropriate to discuss the extent to 23 which these elections were competitive -namely, how contested the constituencies were among coalitions. Looking at the difference in percentage points between the winning coalition and the one that came second, we can see how contestable each electoral district was. Figure 13 below shows a map of such gaps between the first and second coalition in every single-and multi-member constituency. The contestability (the darker shades in the map, corresponding to smaller differences) was higher in the former Red Zone and in the South, as well as in Milan, Turin and Rome. Indeed, no SMC in the former Red Zone and the South was won with the absolute majority of the votes.
Overall, 47 single-member districts (and 14 MMCs) were won by a margin of 10 percentage points or less. Among them, 22 (and 6 MMCs) were highly contestable, with a distance of 5 percentage points or less. In Table 9, we can see the distribution by macro-area of the coalition or party that came in second place in the SMCs of the lower Chamber won by the right-wing coalition. They show very clearly the specular geographical distribution of the centre-left coalition and the M5S -as suggested by our correlation matrix above, which indicated a negative correlation between the vote for the M5S and the parties of the coalition. The centre-left coalition arrived in second place in all the SMCs won by the right-wing coalition in the Northern regions and the former Red Zone and in most of the Centre-South. In the Southern regions, the situation is radically different. Conte's party prevailed over the centre-left coalition in 24 SMCs -34 in total, taking into account those won by the M5S -while Letta's coalition outperformed the Movimento 5 Stelle in only 10 SMCs. Finally, Azione-Italia Viva did not come second in any SMC, also considering those not won by the right.

Implications for the Italian Party System
Previous literature considers Italy as an outlier among other Western European countries, due to its low level of party system institutionalization. As Emanuele and Chiaramonte (2020) note, based on the high innovation and volatility in the electoral, parliamentary, and governmental arenas, the Italian system is in fact de-institutionalized. The same conclusion is also reached both by broader comparative studies on party system institutionalization (see Casal Bértoa, 2017;Chiaramonte & Emanuele, 2019) and by analyses assessing the Italian electoral results, that show overall low levels of stability and predictability of party competition, especially since 2013 (Chiaramonte & Emanuele, 2014;Chiaramonte et al., 2019;Chiaramonte et al., 2023). In this section, we briefly analyse four classic indicators of party system institutionalisation, placing the figures for the 2022 election in the framework of the country's overall historical trends. In the remainder of this section, we therefore discuss disproportionality, fragmentation, party system innovation and electoral volatility.

Electoral disproportionality
In section 3, we already discussed the mismatch between the vote shares of political parties and the share of seats, due to the majoritarian component of the electoral system. To capture (and visually inspect) this gap between votes and seats, we rely on the formula proposed by Gallagher (1991,2023). 12 As we can see from Figure 14 below, disproportionality was extremely low during the First Republic, thanks to a proportional formula with extremely low representation thresholds.
After 1994, Italy experienced three different electoral laws and each of them incorporated -to varying degrees -strong majoritarian components. This is reflected in the level of electoral disproportionality, which has been higher since then (Pasquino & Valbruzzi, 2023). After the exceptional levels reached in 2013, the 2022 election sees another clear increase compared to the 2018 election -although held with the same electoral law.
As we have already seen in our analysis of the contestability of the SMCs, the right-wing coalition, with a vote share of 44%, won around 80% of SMCs in both chambers while in 2018 the dominant actor (again the right-wing coalition) obtained just over 40% of seats with 37% of votes.
The disproportional effect of the electoral law thus was displayed in full force in 2022. Four years earlier, in fact, the territorial differentiation among the three main blocks somehow "hid" the majoritarian effects of the electoral law (Emanuele & Vassallo, 2018).

Fragmentation
Italy is generally considered a rather fragmented party system, due to the high number of political actors competing at the national level (but see, for instance, Vampa, 2015, for the regional level). This is not an entirely new phenomenon. Although fragmentation had peaked already in the 1990s (cf. Morlino, 1996;D'Alimonte & Bartolini, 1997), the subsequent electoral laws offered increasing incentives to coalesce and structure political competition around a smaller number of "blocs", thus reducing the overall level of fragmentation.
The degree of fragmentation of a party system can be expressed through the effective number of political parties. The most common measure thereof is the index proposed by Laakso and Taagepera (1979;cf. Gallagher, 2023), which weighs parties according to their size and can be applied both in the electoral and the parliamentary context. Figure 15 shows the effective number of parliamentary parties (ENPP) and the number of electoral parties (ENEP). 13 We can see that the level of fragmentation had been stable in the so-called First Republic, then experiencing the sharpest increase in the early 1990s. In 2001-2008, where the party system approximated a "weakly institutionalised" (Chiaramonte et al., 2023: 23) bipolarism, the fragmentation decreased to then 13 The indices are calculated dividing 1 by the summation of the squared share of seats (for ENPP) or votes (for ENEP) of each party in the system.

27
increase from 2013 onwards. In other words, the effects of the majoritarian elements introduced by the electoral laws adopted since 1994 have been at best mixed, and fragmentation has been increasing in the last three elections, in which the competition was characterised by the presence of three main blocs -centre-left, (former) centre-right, M5S -plus at least one other national list able to enter Parliament (a centrist actor in 2013 and 2022; a left-wing one in 2018).

Innovation
The number of new actors in the system -excluding coalitions or mergers of previous parties -is useful to understand how innovative the political landscape is in terms of supply. Those new actors, however, do not necessarily have a disruptive effect on the party system merely because of their existence; much depends on their coalition and/or blackmail potential (Sartori 1976), connected to the support they gather. To grasp such dynamics, we rely on the data by Emanuele (2016) to calculate an index of party system innovation. Such an index aggregates the vote shares of new parties reaching 1% of votes nationwide and indicates how much (or how little) the emergence of new parties affects the political balance in a country.
As is visible in Figure 16 below, after the peak in 1994, with the radical re-structuration of the party system and the start of the so-called Second Republic, 2013 witnessed another radical election in terms of innovation, mainly due to the rise of the M5S. The latter finding is in line with the simultaneous developments in other European countries, and it may be connected to the rise of challenger actors across Europe in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 financial crisis. In 2018 the degree of innovation was overall rather low, while in 2022 the index of innovation increased again from 3.7 to 7.8, thanks to the rather good result of the newly formed Terzo Polo.

Electoral volatility
Electoral volatility can be understood as the amount of change in the configuration of the party system that is due to individual vote transfers: in short, it measures the extent to which voters switch from one party to another between elections. It therefore provides a measure of the stability of electoral competition and the loyalty of voters to the same party from one election to the other. It is thus strongly connected with the effective number of parties and with party system innovation (cf. Emanuele, 2015).
For an index of the total electoral volatility of the Italian party system, we rely on the Dataset of Electoral Volatility and its internal components in Western Europe  published by Emanuele (2015) and updated to the latest election (see Emanuele & Marino, 2022). We show the historical trends thereof in Figure 17 below, which reports the score of the Pedersen (1979) index. 14 Unsurprisingly, the highest values correspond to 1994 -the first election after the collapse of the so- 14 The index is calculated as the summation of the vote change in consecutive elections for each party, divided by 2.

29
called First Republic -and 2013, when the M5S made its impressive electoral debut. In other words, elections in which the emergence of new actors led to a deep restructuring of the party system.
Nevertheless, the value for the 2022 election is the third highest and comes after an election -that of 2018 -that still presented a high level of volatility. Indeed, the figure of volatility in the last three Italian elections is unprecedented across Western Europe (Chiaramonte et al., 2023: 22).

Conclusions
The outcome of the 2022 election did not come as a surprise: Fratelli d'Italia's success and the formation of the Meloni government confirmed the predictions of the polls. The right-wing coalition gathered support across the whole country. The opposition parties appeared too ideologically fragmented to coordinate effectively against the right-wing coalition, thus paving the way for it to win a large parliamentary majority -the first time since 2008 that a pre-electoral alliance has done so. The only real winner of the election can therefore be considered Fratelli d'Italia, the most nationalised party in terms of geographical distribution and even relatively homogeneous in terms of urban-rural divide. Its allies obtained disappointing results compared to 2018 and rarely exceeded -combined -the electoral strength of FdI at the local level.

30
The structure of competition, however, has remained substantially tripolar, despite the changes in the internal balance of the right-wing coalition. The disproportional effects of the electoral system have been fully displayed, but still failed to reduce the fragmentation in both the electoral and parliamentary arena, where the effective number of parties has increased compared to 2018. In fact, the share of votes received by new political parties has also increased. The electorate itself appears to be fickle, each time supporting the actor that portrays itself as the outsider: indeed, the total volatility of the system almost reached the levels of 2013.
These elements paint a picture of fragmentation and instability, that characterize the low degree of institutionalization of the Italian party system. This could be especially problematic in a context of record low turnout where political dissatisfaction seems to remain the protagonist, with less than two out of three voters casting a valid ballot. The resulting trend, therefore, marks a paradox: a consolidation of instability itself.