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From proportional representation to plurality and back: Post-Christian Democratic parties compared

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

Aldo Di Virgilio
Aldo Di Virgilio*
Affiliation:
University of Bologna, Italy
*
∗Email: aldo.divirgilio@unibo.it
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Abstract

This article analyses the competition strategies adopted by the Christian Democratic (DC) and post-Christian Democratic (post-DC) parties after the electoral reforms of 1993 and 2005. Four main aspects are considered: the significance of cultural (ideological and cognitive) factors in the DC's exit from the political stage; the need to adapt post-DC strategy to bipolarism and the nostalgia for an autonomous centre; the nature and geography of the post-DC vote; and the attitudes of the middle-level elites of the three principal post-DC parties (the DL, the UDEUR and the UDC) vis-à-vis the competitive and strategic decisions they had to make. The article reaches the following conclusions: the post-DC parties share the same cultural orientations and have similar politico-electoral characteristics (a confessional background, the relevance of patronage networks and personalistic vote mobilisation); all three parties adapted, in different ways and with different degrees of success, to the new structure of coalitional bipolarism in the decade 1996–2006; and both research data on the main post-DC parties’ national congress delegates and the evolution of their electoral strategies on the eve of the 2008 elections show that the post-Christian Democrats felt more at home in the centre-left alignment, together with the post-communist PDS-DS, than in the centre-right alignment led by Berlusconi.

Keywords

CentreChristian Democratic partiesElectoral reformPolitical competitionLearning process
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , November 2008 , pp. 429 - 449
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

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