The Indelible Mark of History on Democracy

SHAPING ELECTION RESULTS IN ITALY FROM THE POSTWAR PERIOD TO THE FIRST REPUBLIC WERE THE EFFECTS AND DURATION OF THE NAZI OCCUPATION AND THE CIVIL WAR. THE MEMORY AND ACTIONS OF VOTERS ON EITHER SIDE OF THE GOTHIC LINE DEMONSTRATE THIS. AS TABELLINI, NANNICINI AND FONTANA OBSERVE IN A WORKING PAPER

by Guido Tabellini, Intesa Sanpaolo Chair in Political Economics

Material interests are not enough to explain citizens’ political attitudes. Ideology, culture and history also play a crucial role. In a working paper with Bocconi’s Tommaso Nannicini and London School of Economics’ Nicola Fontana, we argue that the electoral success of the Italian radical left in the post-war era can be traced back to the Italian civil war and the Nazi occupation during World War II.

A democracy born out of a civil war inherits a legacy of polarization and conflict that puts it in a very different starting position, compared to one where political institutions evolved more gradually and peacefully. The civil war and the Nazi occupation had a profound and lasting impact on Italian politics. They shaped the Italian Constitution, the party system, the identity of political leaders, and political traditions and narratives for several decades. In this paper we show that these events also had a profound and lasting impact on voters’ behavior.

Between September 1943 and May 1945, Italy was a battleground between the Allies and the Germans. Italy itself was split, with resistance brigades fighting the Germans, and troops loyal to Mussolini helping them. The intensity of the war varied across Italy, since the Allies freed Southern and much of Central Italy almost immediately, while Northern-Central Italy remained under Nazi occupation for much longer. In particular, the battlefront between Germans and Allies remained stuck for about six months near the so called Gothic line, a line cutting Northern-Central Italy from West to East.
The position of the line was determined by accidental military criteria, and municipalities close to but on opposite sides of the battlefront are very similar in most respects. The main difference between these municipalities is that those North of the line were exposed to a longer Nazi occupation and a longer civil war. Any difference in their post-war voting outcomes can thus be attributed to the longer duration of the foreign occupation and civil war.

Post-war election outcomes are indeed starkly different. In municipalities just North of the line, where the Nazi occupation lasted longer, the extreme left (communist) party turned out to be on average much stronger: its vote share in the 1946 election to the Constitutional Assembly is about 8 percentage points larger than just South of the line (after conditioning on the latest pre-war election outcomes that were held in the 1920s). These differences are highly persistent and last in subsequent national elections until the end of the First Republic in the early 1990s.

The historical evidence suggests that the mechanism operates through citizens’ attitudes. Exposure to a longer and more violent foreign occupation led voters to identify with the political force that stood up most forcefully against the enemy and that in the end won the civil war, namely the Communist Party. A random survey of about 2,500 individuals residing in 242 municipalities within 50 km from the Gothic line, conducted in 2015, corroborates this interpretation: memory of the civil war is stronger North of the Gothic line and amongst individuals who have a left wing political orientation and there is also some weak evidence of mildly more anti-German attitudes North of the line. 
The Italian First Republic was unusual amongst advanced European democracies, in having a very large Communist party. This had important implications on the Italian political system, because it led to decades of what commentators have called a “blocked democracy”, with no alternation between government and opposition. The Nazi occupation and the civil war can explain this Italian anomaly, pointing to an important legacy of the history of how democracies are born.