How do established voters react to new parties? The case of Italy, 1985-2008

The Italian party system largely collapsed in the early 1990s, providing us with a natural experimental situation in which voters were confronted with new parties - indeed, with an entirely new party system. How did they react? This paper develops a number of expectations on the basis of existing theory and tests these expectations using a dataset consisting of election studies conducted in Italy between 1985 and 2008. We find that a new party system causes confusion as to where parties stand in left-right terms, making it difficult for voters to make their choices on the basis of ideological cues. The confusion is greatest among older voters - those already set in their habits of voting, but only the very oldest cohorts (containing voters over 60 years old) are significantly debilitated.