The integrity of the 2022 Italian parliamentary election: A subjective perspective

Abstract

Democracy is a political regime in which citizens can select their rulers through electoral procedures. Thus, effective rules and institutions are necessary for democracy to work correctly. Besides these institutional prerequisites, democracy needs attitudes and behaviors to be shared by the most relevant political actors. Among them, the losers’ consent to accept an electoral defeat plays a key role and should be considered a necessary feature of electoral integrity. This paper uses survey data collected by ITANES – about 4,000 cases ‒ to assess evaluations of the fairness of the 2022 Italian parliamentary election as expressed by a representative sample of citizens. We treat perceptions of fairness as a dependent variable, and through a series of bivariate analyses and then a multivariate regression, we research the covariates that can make sense of their distribution. Results show that the voter with the highest probability of perceiving the 2022 parliamentary election as fair is a male over 64 years old who voted for the winning parties, has a pro-democratic attitude, lives in a municipality of under 30,000 inhabitants, and has a high level of education.

Keywords

• electoral integrity
• 2022 Italian general election
• electoral competition