Geographies of discontent: Public service deprivation and the rise of the far right in Italy

The forthcoming article “Geographies of discontent: Public service deprivation and the rise of the far right in Italy” by Simone Cremaschi, Paula Rettl, Marco Cappelluti, and Catherine E. De Vries is summarized by the author(s) below.

What happens if in a country where public service provision has traditionally been high, communities’ access to public services is substantially reduced? This study examines this question by studying the effect of a 2010 administrative reform in Italy which forced municipalities to jointly manage public services, such as garbage collection or policing for example. The results show that exposure to the reform not only increased public service deprivation, that is to say it reduced access to services, but also that it boosted the vote share of far-right parties. With a more in-depth examination of how exposure to the reform fueled support for the far right in Italy, the study shows that it is a combination of both changing voter preferences and the rhetoric of political parties. Residents living in municipalities affected by the reform expressed greater concern about immigration compared to those living in other places. And far-right parties increasingly linked the state of public services to immigration in their rhetoric after the reform. Overall, these findings suggest that people’s concerns about public services and the composition of their community are intertwined. Public service deprivation leads native-born residents to feel they are competing for access to public resources with immigrants. Far-right rhetoric linking public services to immigration finds fertile ground in these contexts. What is more, these findings help us to better understand why electoral support for far right parties is geographically concentrated in communities that feel that they do not receive their fair share of public resources and feel left behind by the state.

About the Author(s): Simone Cremaschi is a a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Bocconi University’s Department of Social and Political Sciences and Dondena Centre, Paula Rettl is an Assistant Professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School, Marco Cappelluti is a PhD candidate in Political Science at University College London, and Catherine E. De Vries is the Dean of International Affairs and a Professor of Politics at Bocconi University in Milan. Their research “Geographies of discontent: Public service deprivation and the rise of the far right in Italy” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.