Abstract

The paper aims to address the role played in the 2013 election by people's (dis)satisfaction with the general state of the polity and by the evaluation of overall government performance and competence. The underlying hypothesis is that in the Italian political cycle 2011-13 - characterised by the political decline of the centre-right government and the experience of a "technical government" backed in Parliament by a grand coalition of the main parties, against a background of a worsening economic and financial crisis - both dimensions have played a role in shaping voters' political attitudes and preferences. A descriptive analysis of the two sets of factors (both longitudinal and cross-sectional) will be followed by the test of a multivariate explanatory model of voters' choice. The data used in the paper comes from an Itanes longitudinal panel study of Italian voters, who were interviewed five times between 2011 and 2013 at regular intervals (the first wave of interviews was carried out in February-March 2011 and the last one was held shortly after the 2013 general election).