Was Mattarella worth the trouble? Explaining the failure of the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum

Abstract

The election of President Mattarella is a turning point in Matteo Renzi’s attempt to reform the constitution. This choice determined the loss of Forza Italia’s support to the constitutional reform, thus leaving the Renzi cabinet and the Democratic Party alone on the Yes-side. Our goal is to assess the degree of Renzi’s misjudgment by comparing two theoretical perspectives on voting behavior in direct-democratic settings through a nested design. Our results highlight that vote choices can be explained by both the systematic and the heuristic modes of information processing. Respondents’ agreement with the content of the reform (systematic mode) and a positive evaluation of the Renzi cabinet (heuristic mode) are key predictors of Yes vote. Instead, the negative assessment of the economic situation is a crucial driver of No vote. Lastly, we build a bridge between these two perspectives by showing that partisan attachments conditioned the effect of respondents’ content evaluation on voting behavior.

Ideological Disagreement and the Rejection of Laws by Italian Heads of State

“…Economic crises can be very relevant. The state of the economy is generally deemed as a proxy for the performance of the cabinet, so that if the economic situation worsens, citizens will punish the incumbent (Negri & Rebessi, 2018). Accordingly, when the economic situation is negative, presidents can expect that public opinion will support their viewpoint (Grimaldi, 2023) and will turn against the prime minister, in case of a conflict over the promulgation of laws.…”

“…Economic crises can be very relevant. The state of the economy is generally deemed as a proxy for the performance of the cabinet, so that if the economic situation worsens, citizens will punish the incumbent (Negri & Rebessi, 2018). Accordingly, when the economic situation is negative, presidents can expect that public opinion will support their viewpoint (Grimaldi, 2023) and will turn against the prime minister, in case of a conflict over the promulgation of laws.Hypothesis (H4): The number of laws rejected by the president will increase in times of economic crises, when the state of the economy worsens.Hypothesis (H5): The number of laws rejected by the president will increase in times of institutional crises.…”

Political consequences of conspiratorial thinking: evidence from 2016 Italian constitutional referendum

“…In the context of topdown national referenda, and especially when the issues at stake are complex, it has been shown that partisanship might represent a powerful cue, allowing people to vote without having to understand every detail of the issue at stake, by merely aligning to the decision suggested by the party they support and trust in (Hobolt, 2007;Quaranta et al, 2019). After 2016 Italian constitutional referendum various studies showed that the vast majority of voters aligned to the decision of the parties they supported (Di Mauro and Memoli, 2018;Negri and Rebessi, 2018).…”