Italy went to the polls on 4 March 2018 in a general election whose outcome was highly uncertain until the very last day of the campaign. The three main contenders were the centre-right coalition led by Berlusconi and Salvini, the centre-left coalition headed by Renzi, and the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement)-a populist, anti-establishment party founded by comedian Beppe Grillo and now led by Luigi Di Maio. Uncertainty surrounded the election outcome not only due to the employment of a new, untested electoral system, but also as a result of the very high percentage of undecided voters and the competitiveness of the main political groupings. According to the polls, none of them would get the majority of seats in Parliament required to form a government outright.

The 2018 Italian election featured striking results, with both a historic success for the two challenger parties (League and M5S) and massive defeats for the two mainstream parties (PD and FI). In this article, we analyse party campaign strategies, and their consistency with the opportunity structures provided by the configuration of Italian public opinion. Relying on issue yield theory, we collected original survey data for both issue support and priority among Italian voters, and party emphases on issues in the electoral campaign -through Twitter data. Our findings indicate a generalised ideological inconsistency of the constituencies of main parties, while campaign strategies appear much more ideologically consistent. Moreover, we find that parties focussed mostly on conflict-mobilisation strategies, rather than on problem-solving. Finally, we show that, in general, parties acted strategically, by aligning their campaign to the available opportunities, although with relevant variations across parties.

While official science has given its answer to the question on the origin of the Coronavirus (animal to human transmission), alternative theories on human creation of the virus – purposely or inadvertently – have flourished. Those alternative theories can be easily located among the family of conspiracy theories, as they always assume some secretive activity of some groups acting on their self-interest and against the good of the many. The article assesses the prevalence of these beliefs during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, studies its development during the pandemic, and investigates its potential determinants. In particular, it analyses the relationship between beliefs in alternative theories on the origin of the virus and political orientation, by arguing that the association cannot be attributed to (politically) motivated reasoning, as the issue has not been highly politicized in the Italian context. Alternatively, the article suggests that the main factor driving beliefs in alternative accounts on the origins of the virus is institutional trust. Political orientation moderates its effects, depending on specific conditions (e.g. cue taking, position of the supported party either in government or opposition), and eventually reinforcing scepticism towards epistemic authorities for those with low trust in institutions. Data come from the ResPOnsE COVID-19 survey, carried out with daily samples from April to July 2020 (N > 15.000) to monitor the development of the Italian public opinion during the Coronavirus pandemic.

This study aims to explain the solidarity behavior toward a specific needy group that is not part of the national community (refugees) in comparison with vulnerable in-groups (the disabled or the unemployed), taking into account the interplay between individuals’ political orientations and their social dispositions based on the ranking preferences of solidarity beneficiaries. Through a multivariate regression analysis of survey data in eight European countries, we find that respondents’ ranking preferences have a lower impact on solidarity practices toward refugees, which are strongly fostered by progressive political orientations. This means that support for refugees relies on a universalistic conception of solidarity and entails political commitment to both leftist positions on economic issues and to libertarian stances on cultural issues. The latter only affect solidarity actions toward needy out-groups, unveiling the tensions between universalistic-particularistic concerns that are embodied in individual perceptions of deservingness between groups and in the cultural–identitarian dimension of political conflict.

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