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Political scientists who have written about party decline (the ‘crisis of parties’) fall into two broad categories: one group includes those who focus their analysis on the organizational structures, functions and membership of parties, and their performance in government and in representative institutions; a second group has been more concerned with citizens’ attitudes towards political parties, although their empirical studies have rarely focused on the question of the decline in public support for parties, and have instead been primarily concerned with themes such as the evolution of party identification, electoral participation, and the traditional social ties linking parties to citizens. Despite widespread interest in this theme, there have been surprisingly few empirical studies of the extent and possible origins of anti‐party attitudes. Aims to fill this gap in the literature by systematically exploring the hypothesis of the ‘decline of parties’ from the standpoint of citizen support for these key institutions in four Southern European democracies, although the existing literature on the topic has produced contradictory findings. Has four complementary objectives: (1) to develop and discuss attitudinal indicators that can serve as adequate measures of anti‐party sentiments; (2) to observe the evolution of these indicators over time in a variety of contexts; (3) to discuss their relationship with other aspects of political behaviour; and (4) to speculate about the origins of anti‐party sentiments. While most of the analysis focuses on Spain, similar attitudes are also explored in Portugal, Italy, and Greece, in an effort to determine the extent to which an increase in anti‐party sentiments represents a general feature of contemporary West European democracies, and to what extent it maybe linked to a broader concept of political disaffection; also examined are some of the consequences of this phenomenon with regard to electoral behaviour, to psychological identification of citizens with parties, and to the overall level of involvement of citizens in public life.

The defining feature of English national identity for many decades was its absence in politics. This has changed with the mobilisation of a particular strain of English national identity. It was not the only factor influencing choices in the 2016 EU referendum, but it was an important one. All of the concerns that are most intensely expressed by English identifiers—opposition to immigration, social and cultural conservatism, political disaffection and support for separate English political institutions—were associated with higher support for Brexit. Brexit, however, is not the end of the story. The referendum provoked intense political mobilisation by the English identifiers, but the election of June 2017 has sparked a similarly intense reaction from the British identifiers, denying the pro-Brexit Government their majority. The two votes just a year apart have highlighted how deep the identity divides in England have become.

Chapter 4 enters directly into the heart of the book. First, it provides a summary of the theoretical framework and outlines our major research hypotheses. Second, it describes the Italian political system of the 1990s and highlights its most salient characteristics, thus setting the basis for our classification of Italian citizens. Finally, it describes the classification criteria used to assign respondents to different voting categories. The first type, utilius, understands politics using the ideological categories of “left” and “right” and defines his own voting preference following a principle of spatial proximity. The second type of voter, amicus, conceives of politics as a dichotomy; she tends to reduce reality to a dualism: the competition between party coalitions (and between their leaders). A third type, aliens, is driven by an active rejection of politics and is unwilling or unable to represent the political debate through traditional ideological categories. The last type, medians, constitutes a residual category, including all those cases that do not belong to the previous categories. The analysis is based on two public opinion surveys carried out by the Itanes (Italian National Election Studies) research group.

To what extent does society need a 'second-wave' of writing on depoliticisation to correct the biases of the first and thereby to improve our capacity to gain analytical traction on the dynamic interplay between politicising and depoliticising tendencies in contemporary liberal democracies? This chapter welcomes the debate this special issue has opened, but defend the first wave against its critics. More specifically, it argues that the first wave literature provides ample analytical and theoretical resources to capture the dynamic interplay between depoliticising tendencies and politicising or repoliticising counter-tendencies which its critics rightly place at centre stage. Indeed, it goes further, suggesting that the more empirical contributions of the special issue, while bringing a series of new and important insights to the analysis of politicisation–depoliticisation dynamics, in fact do so by drawing extensively on first wave depoliticisation theory. Such work is very necessary and advances significantly our understanding of depoliticising, but it extends rather than challenges first wave perspectives and is ultimately better characterised as 'second generation' rather than 'second wave'.

Chapter 8 summarizes the various findings and discusses them in relation to the debate over the measurement of political sophistication and the more general issue of the low political literacy of citizens in democratic societies. In general, the Italian population is described as divided between citizens who are highly capable of handling the political debate either through classical ideological categories—the utilius—or through an effective simplification of the political competition—the amicus—and citizens who are peripheral to politics, and do not possess the instruments necessary for making sense of it—the aliens. The strategy used to build the typology of voting heuristics is offered as a general interpretive framework for analyzing decision-making strategies in political environments characterized by a multiplicity of parties and a mixed electoral system. This approach offers new bases for estimating levels of political competence, and for measuring the political sophistication of the mass public. Finally, a number of ideas are put forward as to how experimental research might advance the study of cognitive processes.

Chapter 6 examines the effectiveness of the cognitive shortcuts and the consistency of their use, and shows that the judgment strategies used by utilius, amicus, and aliens are deployed not just in determining their voting behavior but also in other decision-making tasks they undertake. In particular, we show that utilius voters rely on the left-right ideological dimension even when they judge policy issues, or their future voting preferences, and that amicus voters use their simplified vision of politics in which the political competition is limited to the two major coalitions both in their judgment of political leaders and the performance of the government. The effectiveness of these heuristics is proved by the fact that utilius and amicus voters show levels of coherence in the organization of their opinions that are higher than those of the most interested and educated individuals. On the contrary, the aliens type, who does not follow the decision-making mechanisms employed by utilius and amicus, is much less capable of using the left-right dimension to manage the organization of the parties and his issue opinions even compared to the least educated and interested voters. However, even the aliens voter is not without an organizing principle. Indeed, he is guided by a cynic realism, or pessimism, that leads to systematically negative evaluations of every party, coalition, and political leader.

Disenchantment with democracy may have different sources. One such source is the discrepancy between the expected advantages of the system and the experience with real democracy. In our research, we found that these expectations depend on lay theories of democracy that may differ substantially from its normative conceptions and practical realizations. Another source is the change in social priorities that can be described as a conservative shift. This change is a reaction to an increased sense of existential and epistemic insecurity that entails higher preferences for strong government founded on tradition and a shared worldview. It is associated with decreased importance of political agency and pluralism. There is also disappointment with democratic politics based on adversarial principles, in which those who gain political advantage shape the political and social relations according to their own interests and points of view, ignoring the interests and views of others.