Was it all about personalization? The determinants of the vote in the 2016 constitutional referendum in Italy

The Italian constitutional referendum marked a turning point for the Italian political system. In sharp contrast with the Brexit referendum, for which a burgeoning literature analysed the different aspects of the voting behaviour, the 2016 constitutional referendum has insofar attracted much less attention. In this paper I examine the extent to which this referendum can be considered as a second order election or, to the contrary, whether political beliefs impacted in the voters’ choice. While party identification hypothesis has a weak explanatory power in this peculiar case, personalization can be assumed to be a proxy of the voter’s choice to punish or rewarding the incumbent government.