The 2018 Italian general election: party strategies in a changing political space

The 2018 Italian election featured striking results, with both a historic success for the two challenger parties (League and M5S) and massive defeats for the two mainstream parties (PD and FI). In this article, we analyse party campaign strategies, and their consistency with the opportunity structures provided by the configuration of Italian public opinion. Relying on issue yield theory, we collected original survey data for both issue support and priority among Italian voters, and party emphases on issues in the electoral campaign - through Twitter data. Our findings indicate a generalised ideological inconsistency of the constituencies of main parties, while campaign strategies appear much more ideologically consistent. Moreover, we find that parties focussed mostly on conflict-mobilisation strategies, rather than on problem-solving. Finally, we show that, in general, parties acted strategically, by aligning their campaign to the available opportunities, although with relevant variations across parties.