Positional or Valence Populism? A Cognitive and Inductive Approach to Governments, Political Space and the Party System in Contemporary Italy

The paper presents a study of the party positions in the Italian Parliament based on an inductive approach to the parliamentary debate and investiture votes of the government led by G. Meloni (2022-). Through a content analysis of the parliamentary debate on the investiture votes, a survey is provided of political themes tackled by G. Meloni and by the main Italian parliamentary groups. The scope of the research is to assess the alignments of the Italian parties after the decline of the traditional left-to-right cleavage and the rise of the populist trend. The multidimensional character of the space of competition is highlighted and, through a comparison with the policy content of the investiture debates of governments led by S. Berlusconi (1994-2005) and recently G. Conte (2018-2020), the paper tackles the controversy of whether populist parties are “valence” or “positional”. Populist parties in Italy do take policy positions when they are called to assume executive accountability and the differences between the two moods emerge as a particular declension of the political discourse in an era of the demise of politics.