Anti-establishment coalition governments in Southern Europe: Greece and Italy

Abstract

Anti-establishment parties with either a left-wing or a right-wing ideological slant have been entering contemporary European Democracies with sizeable vote shares. During the Great Recession, the Greek and the Italian party system could be perceived as convergent case-studies for the formation and breakthrough of anti-establishment parties. Given the fact that ideologically diverging antiestablishment parties-the Coalition of the Radical Left-Social Unionist Front (SYRIZA) and the Independent Greeks (ANEL) in the Greek case, as well as the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League in the Italian one-came to power and formed coalition governments, the primary goal of this article is to enquire into supply-side parameters, exploring potential associations along a range of programmatic stances and policy dimensions that effectuated these governing alliances. Using the Comparative Manifesto Project dataset, our findings confirm the existence of expected programmatic differences as well as a converging policymaking basis between the anti-establishment coalition partners of both governing alliances.