Abstract

This study investigates how Italian voters have reacted to the parliamentary "grand" coalition in support of the Monti government, in office from November 2011 to February 2013. We argue that the contradictory behaviour of the party élites, consisting of public quarrels on the one hand and of joint support for the government in Parliament on the other, may have provoked a deep sense of disorientation among the voters. This in turn may have led to the depolarisation of the electorate's judgement of the two major Italian parties, the left-wing Pd and the right-wing Pdl. We test this expectation by relying on public opinion data covering a time period from March 2011 to February 2013. While our empirical analyses only partially corroborate the "depolarisation" hypothesis, we find much stronger evidence that the two-faced coalitional behaviour of the main parties combined with a persistent rise of negative feelings towards all the political parties, leading to a potential "mass disengagement" from voting for them. We argue that our findings have important implications for understanding the most recent developments of electoral politics in Italy.