Italian Elections: A non-political analysis of the results

It is clear that the italian elections of March 4th did not result in an easy road for the settlement of a stable goverment. None of the two main winners, the Centre-Right Coalition and the Five-Stars Movement, have the sufficient number of seats to have a majority and lead a new government. Thus, in the next week we will better understand in which direction Italy will go, following the important and fundamental decision from the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, which has the hard task to assign the office of government. Many scenarios are feasible and the possibility of new elections can not be ruled out. Honestly, I would not want to be in his shoes. In the meanwhile, it can be interesting to have a look at how the Italians voted last Sunday. Where did the different parties have the most of the votes? What was crucial in the decision for the citizens? Which electoral promises have found more approval among the voters?

From now on I will exclusively refer to the main Chamber of the Parliament (Camera dei Deputati). Let's start with a quick look at the distribution of votes at a country and regional level. It can clearly be seen from the map above (Source: Financial Times), that what immediately catches your eye is the North vs South contrast. In the North the Centre-Right Coalition (Northern League, Forza Italia, Fratelli d'Italia and Noi con L'Italia-UDC) won basically in almost all the colleges, whit a predominance of the Northern League. In the South the Five-Stars Movement was the undisputed winner. The Centre-Left Coalition, driven mainly by Matteo Renzi's Democratic Party, just got some residual colleges. The Italian Left is not immune to the crisis of the left which we have also seen in the other european elections like in France and Germany. Their rebirth shoul probably start from a period of opposition in the Parliament and from a complete internal reform.

Comparing these results with the map of the previous political elections of 2013 (following, Source: Thern), a completely brand new geography of votes comes out. It is extremely visible the collapse of the Centre-Left, whose votes have converged to the Centre-Right and to the Five-Stars respectively in the North and in the South as I have already underlined. Important to notice the huge expansion of the Five-Stars which has gone from being a small protest movement to being the by far most voted party with a with a national representation of almost 33%. Quite impressive also the growth of the Northen League which had 4.09% in 2013 and now leads his coalition with 17.4%, 4 times more.

I will now focus on the results of an analysis I conducted looking at the correlation between the votes distribution and two of the most important themes that, in my opinion, drove the final decisions for the majority of voters: unemployment and immigration. I will mainly consider the comparison between Five-Stars and Centre-Right since they received approximately 70% of all votes.

Unemployment: The key variable for the success of Five-Stars in the South

For the share of votes in each region I used the available data from the Italian Ministery of Interior. For regions which are divided in more than one district (Piemonte, Lombardia, Veneto, Lazio, Campania and Sicilia), I calculated an arithmetic average through the different districts and I then used this as a comprehensive data for that region. For the unemployment, I used the last available data for the unemployment rate by region i.e. third quarter of 2017 (Source: ISTAT). The goal is to detect if there is a correlation between the percentage of votes that the main parties took in the single regions and the unemployment rate of those specific areas. You can see the result from these scatterplots I created, adding also a linear fit to make the interpretation easier.

There is a strong and clear relationship from both sides. The Five-Stars benefited from a really big shares of votes in the region in which the unemployment rate is high (15-20%) while they got the minimum of their votes in the area with an unemployment rate lower than the national average (around 11%). All the region with high unemployment are indeed in the South. Thus, the unemployment rate explains quite a large part of the south-oriented pattern I explained before (R squared = 78.74%). As a counter-test, the scatteplot for the Centre-Right exhibits the exact opposite trend.

What can be concluded from this? It is not obviously a surpise that the southern regions suffer a real and dramatic problem related to unemployment, with a special worry for the youth one (over 40%). Apparently, the Five-Stars were more sensitive party on this topic. For sure, their key proposal was the introduction of the so called "Reddito di Cittadinanza". This is a basic income for everybody who is unemployed and satisfy some minimum requirements. Nice move on the equity side, but it is a really expensive reform that will probably require them a lot of effort to become effective. But perhaps the South could benefit from that. Posterity will judge.

Immigration: The strongness of the Northern League driven Centre-Right

For the vote percentages I used the same dataset and methodology I highlited before. For the immigration, I used the last available data from the Ministery of Interior (Department for Civil Liberties and Immigration) which collect information on the number of immigrants in reception status. As before, the goal is to analyse the correlation between the votes and this immigration summary number for each region. Again, I created two scatterplots including a linear fit.

As It was possible to imagine, when analysing the Centre-Right performance I find a positive correlation with increasing immigration rate (R squared = 19.12%). This is not a surprise since the Northern League, leading party of the coalition after the election results, have always been tough with the immigration problem. The leader, Matteo Salvini, received a lot of votes in the North following the general discontent, which is related in part to the immigration concern. Out of immigration, he is also against European Union and the Euro and he proposes the Flat Tax. This latter was the most questioned proposal. As a future economist, I can say that I find the Flat Tax unhealthy for our economic system and very distorsive on the equality side. The rich get richer, the poor get just a residual gain.

For the Five-Stars Movement, it seems that the correlation is quite flat (R squared = 0.44%). This also does not surprise me since in their political project they have always tried to avoid the immigration topic and they have conflicting opinions among members inside the party.

To conclude, this article wanted to be a non political/ideological based analysis which aimed to understand a little more about how people choose who to vote for and what they consider as a priority for the country. I hope you enjoyed reading and I am of course open to discussion!