NATIONAL OR LOCAL? THE DUAL CLIMATE OF OPINION IN THE ITALIAN REGIONAL ELECTIONS

For almost twenty years in Italy the traditional political parties have been undergoing a profound crisis caused by internal structural changes but also by changes in the relationship between politics and society. Against this background local politics have often furnished evidence of a growing political and social significance (Bauman, 2003) and shown an autonomous potential to determine which issues and actors dominate the political agenda.
In 1995, a reform of the electoral law for regional elections1 initiated a gradual process of transfer of competences and functions from the central state to sub-national levels (De Luca, 2004). From then on, Italian voters were able to elect directly the chief executives of municipalities, provinces and regions, the three levels of sub-national government provided for by the Constitution.
The electoral-system change altered the relationship between centre and periphery in two ways: first, by giving the sub-national authorities a new role, one more autonomous and independent of central government, reflecting a process of regionalisation of public policy-making (Baldini and Vassallo, 2000); second, by strengthening the links between the localities, and voters, who could now vote for candidates directly.

The local context has thus become a symbolic space, with the potential to change the way in which people relate to politics and to represent the “civic element” of post-modern democracy (Marletti, 2007), showing the extent to which political strategies and logics of communication are increasingly intertwined (Norris, 2000). In contrast with the past, local election campaigns in Italy are now bound up with the electoral cycle and are part of a strategy of permanent campaigning (Blumenthal, 1980; Ornstein and Mann, 2000) that takes in both national and local levels. Following a series of local elections all of which confirmed the validity of this perspective (Marletti, 2007), in 2010 there was a new round of elections which somewhat undermined it.
The local elections of 2010 have, from the point of view of political communication in Italy, become an important object of study, for three reasons. The first is that they involved a large number of voters and a number of important regions.2 The second is that the outcome of the vote was a test of the popularity of the Berlusconi government, whose term of office was at the half-way stage (Bellucci, 2009), but also of the popularity of the Opposition parties, which were in control of many local authorities. The third is that for a number of years politics have been dominated by a prime minister whose public and private affairs are often in the foreground (Vaccari, 2009; Cepernich, 2010) and this situation has significantly changed the relationship between the media and politics in Italy (Roncarolo, 2008).