Simone Cremaschi

While an abundance of scholarly work investigates how economic shocks influence the political behavior of affected individuals, we know much less about their collective effects. Exploiting the sudden onset of a plant disease epidemic in Puglia, Italy—where the plant pathogen Xylella fastidiosa devastated centuries-old olive groves—we explore the collective effects of economic shocks. By combining quantitative difference-in-differences analysis of municipal data with a novel case selection strategy for qualitative fieldwork, we document the hardship caused by the outbreak, and estimate a 2.2-percentage-point increase in far-right vote share. We show that pre-existing public service deprivation moderates the shock’s political consequences through a community narrative of state neglect. These findings highlight that pre-existing community conditions shape the political consequences of economic shocks, and that plant disease epidemics—which are becoming more prevalent due to climate change—have important political effects.

Electoral support for far-right parties is often linked to geographies of discontent. We argue that public service deprivation, defined as reduced access to public services, plays an important role in explaining these patterns. By exploiting an Italian reform that reduced access to public services in municipalities with fewer than 5,000 residents, we show that far-right support in national elections increased in municipalities affected by the reform compared to unaffected ones. We use geo-coded individual-level survey data and party rhetoric data to explore the mechanisms underlying this result. Our findings suggest that concerns about immigration are exacerbated by the reform, and that far-right parties increasingly linked public services to immigration in their rhetoric after the reform. These demand and supply dynamics help us understand how public service deprivation shapes geographic patterns in far-right support.

We empirically assess two contrasting predictions that disasters related to climate change raise support for (1) environmentalist parties and (2) incumbents that successfully provide disaster relief. We study the electoral effects of Vaia, a devastating storm that hit the mountainous area of northeast Italy in 2018. We measure the storm’s material consequences combining satellite and georeferenced data on forest disruption, blackout-related changes in nightlights intensity, and damage relief, and exploit the stark variation in damage intensity between adjacent and closely similar municipalities in a stringent difference-in-differences design. The storm significantly increased support for the regional incumbent – the radical-right Lega in most affected provinces – and did not generate positive electoral returns for parties with environmentalist platforms. More research is needed to understand under which conditions exposure to extreme weather events activates support for environmentalist policy.

Can past wartime experiences affect political behavior beyond those who lived through them? We argue that local experiences of armed resistance leave political legacies that “memory entrepreneurs” can translate into contemporary political action via a community-based process of intergenerational transmission consisting of three core activities – memorialization, localization, and mobilization. We empirically substantiate this argument in Italy, where an intense armed resistance movement against Nazi-Fascist forces took place in the 1940s. We combine statistical analysis of original data across Italian municipalities and within-case analysis of a purposively selected locality to show how the past impacts the present via the preservation and activation of collective memories. This study improves our understanding of the processes of long-term transmission, emphasizes armed resistance as a critical source of the long-term political legacies of war, and explores its political effects beyond electoral and party politics.