Government Performance and Political Attitudes in the Italian Political Cycle 2011-2013

The paper aims to address the role played in the 2013 election by both people’s (dis)satisfaction with the general state of the polity and by the evaluation of overall government performance and competence. The underlying hypothesis is that in the Italian political cycle 2011-2013 – characterized by the political decline of the centre-right government and the experience of a “technical government” backed in Parliament by a grand coalition of the main parties, against a background of a worsening economic and financial crisis - both dimensions have played a role in shaping voters’ political attitudes and preferences. A descriptive analysis of the two sets of factors (both longitudinal and cross-sectional) will be followed by the test of a multivariate explanatory model of voters’ choice. The data used in the paper come from an ITANES longitudinal panel study of Italian voters, who have been interviewed between 2011 and 2013 five times at regular interval (the first wave of interviews was carried out in February-March 2011 and the last one just after the 2013 General election