Questions About Other Countries' Politics that You Were Too Afraid To Ask

[Filuwaúrdjan]

7. But perhaps this is not a coincidence: an outsider may well be preferred to a more locally-rooted candidate from one of the other towns.

I've seen something similar as a possible explanation for the curious fact that none of the last three Orkney & Shetland MPs have been from either Orkney or Shetland.

Huh, that makes some sense. Particularly given that, when you split them up, that curiosity goes away.

I cannot go into that much detail, but I am aware of a conversation that occurred at an event held at a well-known museum in Dudley to launch a book written by a well-known figure born in Walsall. This conversation entailed the bookseller hired for the event wondering whether it would make sense for the museum to buy a few copies from the publisher for its own shop and the senior member of museum staff they were talking to expressing the view that, as nice an idea as that sounded as the person in question was from Walsall there would be no demand for the book in Dudley.

[Oryxslayer]

I guess I'll provide the obvious follow-up to the Black Country Question: Is it really still the case?

Yes, there are plenty of examples worldwide of adjacent economic cores developing differently, maintaining differences, and ending up in different places with different cultures. And those cultures like to persist even when the resident populations shift and times change. There's no denying that.

However, in the modern age where everyone wants to be in or near a city, cause that's where the good paying jobs are, areas that might have once been distinct end up in an unholy mess of urbanization. The most obvious example that springs to my mind is San Francisco and Oakland, but there are many, many more worldwide.

It's not that hard to get past census data to examine this. As a percentage of the resident working age population, you still see larger shares commuters coming in the from the areas to the north, east, and south of Birmingham - the Black County does provide for some of her own. But in terms of raw people, Sandwell, Walsall, and Dudley are numbers 2 through 4 in terms of thousands of commuters to Birmingham. Sandwell is only surpassed slightly by Solihull. Conversely, as a sign of the urban integration, people from Birmingham go in the other direction for work. Solihull has the number one spot by far for Birmingham -> somewhere else, but Sandwell and Walsall are 2 and 3.

[CumbrianLefty]

I mean, the Black Country has its own flag and everything

[EastAnglianLefty]

Though of course Tom Watson is from Kidderminster, which is at least vaguely in the same area.

It's probably ideal, really. Kiddy is within the broader cultural region, but is certainly not part of the Black Country and so you are at once not exactly an outsider but also nowhere the wrong kind of local.

And Kidderminster is if anything even more insular than the Black Country, so the context is familiar.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

Since I'm going to Italy next week:

-How do the parties in the right coalition differ?  Especially Lega (Salvini) versus FDI (Meloni).

-Where does M5S fit in?  Is it basically the replacement for PD in the South of Italy?

-Why is Rome relatively conservative, with Lazio even a right-leaning region?  And, why are Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna the only two more left-leaning regions in the North of Italy?  It seems like there's a general trend towards well-off areas liking the right, so those two surprise me a bit.  Is E-R just about Bologna being the Berkeley of Italy?

[Oryxslayer]

Since I'm going to Italy next week:

-How do the parties in the right coalition differ?  Especially Lega (Salvini) versus FDI (Meloni).

-Where does M5S fit in?  Is it basically the replacement for PD in the South of Italy?

-Why is Rome relatively conservative, with Lazio even a right-leaning region?  And, why are Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna the only two more left-leaning regions in the North of Italy?  It seems like there's a general trend towards well-off areas liking the right, so those two surprise me a bit.  Is E-R just about Bologna being the Berkeley of Italy?

I'm not an expert on Italian politics, but since there are relatively simple questions I'll bite and a local can give a more detailed explanation.

Basically, it's all history influencing the present. Today there may be few differences between Lega and FdI, M5S and PD might be strange bedfellows, and the rural leftism of E-R and Tuscany seems weird, but placed in history they all make sense.

The first two start to make sense if you know how northern Italy is noticeably ahead of Southern Italy is basically every relevant metric.

Lega was until recently Lega Nord, which flirted between regionalism for the north versus the "wasteful" south and separatism for 'Padania.' Their instinctive base of support though positioned the party on the right, and often found itself within the orbit of Berlusconi. The party had close to zero support in the provinces they bothered to contest south of the Po. Scandals, infighting, and new generations not as committed to their brand of regionalism led to a dismal result in 2013 and eventually Salvini taking over the party. He rebranded it to Lega, reoriented the party around euro-skepticism and anti-migrant politics, and you probably know what happened next. They shockingly finished ahead of Berlusconi in 2018, formed the Yellow-Green government, and became the tail that wagged the dog while in power. Lega under Salvini has slowly tried to build southern support - peaking in 2019 with the EU Election Lega landslide that carried numerous southern communities. Since then this support has mostly receded but not to zero.

Note: this is the national Lega story, locally the regional bosses of northern strongholds are still mostly from before Salvini's time and at times take different approaches cause of their deeper community ties.

FdI meanwhile comes from a very different political tradition. The party is the successor to the neo-Fascist MSI and then the post-Fascistic National Alliance. The party, symbol - the tricolour flame - is inherited from those two. They have always done better in Rome, the center, and other specific parts of the south. Initially this is cause of different reactions to the war, but as decades passed and the specifics changed more towards "standard" conservative nostalgia for a 'simpler' past (Meloni is a big LoTR fan for example) it found support in their southern areas because of the economic divide and Christian social traditionalism. Especially once the Christian Democratic electoral behemoth collapsed in scandal. They were at times part of Berlusconi's alliances, but never too strong of a force. FdI like Lega formed out of a bad 2013 result and like Lega took steps to 'modernize' the party. What really kicked the party into power though was the chaos of the various M5S backed governments since 2018 and especially COVID. FdI was the only party to stick to opposition during that period and since everyone tarnished themselves, they were the main alternative.

M5S is much more simple. Started as a pure protest party founded by comedian Beppe Grillo before the Euro Crisis. Their main unifying ideology was anti-system and in favor of more popular say in government  (and their party). They grew during the Euro crisis and especially in economically struggling areas disgusted with politics - most notably the south. In some ways they were a protest party which grew beyond it's own control. This culminated in 2018 with the country rejecting both main alternatives in a anti-migrant environment and seemingly wanting to try M5S. But the predictable thing happened and a party unprepared for power found itself fumbling, flowing from crisis to crisis, and exploited by it's changing coalition partners. Always tilting left economically, the cannibalization of voters by Lega during their government years left the party with few voters who saw themselves as more right than left. Even though M5S and PD don't see fully eye to eye, they ally when in benefits them both cause their voters these days have more in common than with the Right. Sometimes it works out like recently in Sardinia.

E-R and Tuscany are usually PD/Left strongholds cause of legacy identities. Like rural southern France or Andalucía of past decades, the identities here were forged during the years of conflict. Areas strong for left-wing partisans allowed them to build community networks and support structures that persisted down the generations. The legacy of such groups and generations of culture has influenced the cultures and identity of those in the present.

[palandio]

[...]
E-R and Tuscany are usually PD/Left strongholds cause of legacy identities. Like rural southern France or Andalucía of past decades, the identities here were forged during the years of conflict. Areas strong for left-wing partisans allowed them to build community networks and support structures that persisted down the generations. The legacy of such groups and generations of culture has influenced the cultures and identity of those in the present.

Solid post. One minor addition: The term "left-wing partisans" might give the idea that this is mostly WWII-related. And while WWII of course played a major role in forming regional structures and identities, "years of conflict" extends decades further into the past (e.g. the Biennio Rosso and its suppression, but even further into the past). As fellow Atlassian Battista Minola once explained, original left-wing strength in rural E-R and Tuscany is linked to mezzadria, a particular form of sharecropping. See here: https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=294475.1750

Regarding the PD-M5S cleavage I'd like to shamelessly promote an old post of mine:
https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=294475.msg8745219#msg8745219



edit: Another good post by Alcibiades: https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=294475.msg8787112#msg8787112

[Battista Minola 1616]

Since I'm going to Italy next week:

-How do the parties in the right coalition differ?  Especially Lega (Salvini) versus FDI (Meloni).

-Where does M5S fit in?  Is it basically the replacement for PD in the South of Italy?

-Why is Rome relatively conservative, with Lazio even a right-leaning region?  And, why are Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna the only two more left-leaning regions in the North of Italy?  It seems like there's a general trend towards well-off areas liking the right, so those two surprise me a bit.  Is E-R just about Bologna being the Berkeley of Italy?

#1 I think I am going crazy with how often this question comes up. Oryx covered their histories... fine (until halfway into the FdI section, coming back to that). As of their current policies they have somewhat different approaches to things the justice system and regionalism for historical reasons, but their main difference is probably just that Meloni has been trying to build an image as a dependable mainstream conservative and Salvini is busy acting out his role as a shouting buffoon barely concealing his Russian sympathies.

#1b The MSI's and later AN's base of support never really stopped being defined by original post-fascist sympathies and, more visibly later (like at the AN's peak in 1996, of which Al made a map once) it was not necessarily poor, if anything skewing bourgeois in cities. This incidentally is the exact opposite of Lega Nord. The Meloni Tolkien thing leads to a very strange and fascinating rabbithole about neofascist circles but I wouldn't use it to talk about party voters in general.

#2 No, no, no, no and no. But also in an awkward way... they are two parties with very contrasting characteristics (the PD is the partial heir to the two largest political traditions of the so-called First Republic while the M5S is a novel party almost completely unrelated to what came before; the PD is the most institutionalist party while the M5S was founded on being very strongly anti-system; the PD is incredibly factionalist while the M5S never stops being a personality party even though it's been that for at least three different personalities; the PD has a lot of respected local administrators but nobody who knows how to campaign while the M5S has a lot of cranks but incredibly effective populist campaigns in national elections; etc.) which have converged on the same side of not being the Right. That said keep in mind the M5S vote is a lot more Southern than the PD vote is Northern.

#3 Rome is not really relatively conservative (in 2022 it voted twelve points to the left, so to speak, of the country as a whole!), however it is massive and includes a lot of suburban areas the equivalent of which would be separate municipalities elsewhere, and it has a strong post-fascist tradition for reasons that are probably obvious. The rest of Lazio is genuinely rather right-wing - it's a middle-income region without that much industrial history, large cities or universities while again having post-fascist traditions, especially in the Latina area a large amount of which are marshlands that were drained under Mussolini. Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna are... see my post that palandio linked plus discussion of cultural legacies. Nowadays there have been a lot of internal changes and yes, the massive and fairly activist university presence in Bologna nets the PD and allies a lot of votes as well (to a smaller extent also true of Pisa or Florence - note that a long time ago in the 1950s the cores of these cities were conversely much less Communist than their industrial surroundings). However I did not understand the tone of your question. Did you expect a North to South, right to left gradient or something like that?

[YL]

I guess I'll provide the obvious follow-up to the Black Country Question: Is it really still the case?

Yes, there are plenty of examples worldwide of adjacent economic cores developing differently, maintaining differences, and ending up in different places with different cultures. And those cultures like to persist even when the resident populations shift and times change. There's no denying that.

However, in the modern age where everyone wants to be in or near a city, cause that's where the good paying jobs are, areas that might have once been distinct end up in an unholy mess of urbanization. The most obvious example that springs to my mind is San Francisco and Oakland, but there are many, many more worldwide.

It's not that hard to get past census data to examine this. As a percentage of the resident working age population, you still see larger shares commuters coming in the from the areas to the north, east, and south of Birmingham - the Black County does provide for some of her own. But in terms of raw people, Sandwell, Walsall, and Dudley are numbers 2 through 4 in terms of thousands of commuters to Birmingham. Sandwell is only surpassed slightly by Solihull. Conversely, as a sign of the urban integration, people from Birmingham go in the other direction for work. Solihull has the number one spot by far for Birmingham -> somewhere else, but Sandwell and Walsall are 2 and 3.

If you look at the official Travel to Work Areas you will note that there is a Birmingham TTWA which extends from the city north to Tamworth and south to Redditch and Bromsgrove and also includes urban Solihull (Solihull proper plus Chelmsley Wood and Castle Bromwich). None of this is very surprising.

There is also a Dudley TTWA which includes pretty much all of that borough together with a few adjoining areas in Staffordshire and Worcestershire together with most of Sandwell: Oldbury, West Brom, Tipton and Wednesbury. Then there is a rather extensive Wolverhampton & Walsall TTWA which includes pretty much all of the former and most of the latter, but also extends all the way to Lichfield and Cannock as well as west towards Telford (but not getting that far).

There are however bits of the "Black Country boroughs" which are in the Birmingham TTWA. Some of these are I think really spillover of genuine Birmingham suburbia and not really part of the Black Country in spite of the administrative boundary: Pheasey, Streetly, Great Barr. Then there's Smethwick, which I think is usually regarded as Black Country but more associated with Birmingham than the rest of it, and then some of the Warley area to the south of it which was also part of the old Smethwick borough.

However that link does also show you some "alternative TTWAs" using some subsets of occupations, and it does in fact turn out that for some of the higher status ones (e.g. the high qualifications one) the Birmingham, Dudley and Wolverhampton/Walsall TTWAs do all merge into one (but Coventry stays separate). And some weird things happen for some of the others too.