Abstract

"Industrial North/White Zone/Red Belt/South" was the standard scheme for identifying Italian traditional parties' patterns of electoral strength. In 1992 the election outcomes and, in particular, the collapse of the Christian Democracy altered the traditional political geography: the division within the Northern provinces disappeared, leaving room to a new territorial divide: North/Red Belt/South. The article's main argument is that the cleavage between the Centre-North and the Centre-South is not new in the electoral history of the Dc. Variations of the 1992 Dc vote across provinces are time-space regressed from 1948 to 1992 in Italy and within the five geopolitical areas. Although results clearly show different trend patterns in these areas, the patterns within the two northern areas are different from those in the two southern ones. In addition, in the North negative Dc vote variations are related to the increase of civil marriage rates, whereas in the South no relation is visible. Ecological analysis seems to indicate that religious divide was not nationwide but to some extent overlapped with the North-South cleavage. Analysis of individual data show a slightly different picture: closeness to the Dc among weekly church-going catholics was equally distributed across the territory.