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This study analyses the relevance and the meaning given by Italians to the political labels ‘left’ and ‘right’ between 1975 and 2006. Based on responses to the open‐ended question ‘What do you mean by “left/right” in politics?’, the study compares five alternative hypotheses on the meaning of the left‐right axis and show that, despite the alleged end of ideologies, the relevance of the axis has increased over time. A core of abstract meanings persists throughout the thirty‐year period considered. As the importance of abstract meanings has increased over time, reference to more concrete contents (such as ‘parties’ and ‘leaders’) has decreased. The findings thus support the hypothesis that the left‐right axis has the functional characteristics of social representations.

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We explore the motivations behind the electoral success of the Lega and the Five-star Movement at the 2018 Italian general election. In most of the literature on populism, the success of the new European populist parties is interpreted as stemming from the process of globalisation, which has produced the so-called 'modernisation losers': 'cultural losers' (people who are disorientated by changes in values, by new waves of migration and by the loss of national sovereignty to the European Union) and 'economic losers' (those for whom the globalisation process has meant economic hardship, downward social mobility and occupational uncertainty). It is these 'modernisation losers' who are claimed to have voted for the populist parties. To this two-fold theoretical hypothesis, we added another: the rise in populism can be explained by the democratic malaise, and particularly by the crisis of mainstream parties, which have steadily lost their function as a link between the people and politics. We analyse the role of these three antecedents of populismlabelled as cultural, economic and political drawing on 2018 Italian National Election Studies (ITANES: see www. itanes.org/en) data. Votes for the Lega were motivated by 'cultural populism', while those for the Five-star Movement could be ascribed to 'political populism', stemming from citizens' growing mistrustgeneralised and latent in Western democraciesof political institutions, activated in Italy by favourable structural conditions and external circumstances.

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