In sum, the politics of pre-electoral coalition formation can increase disproportionality, particularly when voters decide late. The phenomenon is not limited to the Italian case, just particularly visible there. The article is open access here: doi.org/10.1080/1360...

Consider, as another example, the Italian election of 1994, where the dynamics we identify disadvantaged Berlusconi’s at-the-time nascent political formation.

Importantly, pre-electoral coalition formation might drive disproportionality beyond our case. Particularly, this should hold in contexts where parties are new, volatility is high, and voters “decide late”.

Studying the resulting “intra-coalition disproportionality” is relevant because it tells us how the principle of giving each citizen an equal opportunity to influence the political process is applied by political partners within the parliamentary and the governmental arena.

By election day, electoral support shifted away from the Lega significantly but candidacies had already been allocated. Thus, a generous ex-ante endowment of candidacies for the Lega led to its overrepresentation in terms of seats.

For the center-left coalition, striking a proportional bargain proved difficult, given the low number of promising districts. Additionally, the PD needed to make concessions to compensate the risk that smaller partners would defect or fail to cross the electoral threshold in the PR tier.

We analyze the allocation of (FPTP) candidacies among the partners of the main pre-electoral coalitions. The right-wing coalition distributed candidacies (largely) proportional to their partners’ momentary strength in the polls as well as in a manner that safeguarded incumbent MPs.

We study the Italian election of 2022, after which the Lega received more seats (and subsequently more ministers) than their share of votes would have suggested. Importantly, part of this disproportionality cannot be explained by the electoral system itself.