Political Participation and Electoral Participation in Italy

Political participation is a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon regarding most people in their daily life. The aim of this work is to measure the level of political involvement in the Italian regions through the construction of a composite index. The indicators used are discussing political issues more than once a week, taking part in political meetings, taking part in political demonstrations, listening to political debate, volunteering for a political party, giving money to a political party, and seeking information on politics once a week. They refer to the year 2018 and were derived from Indagine Multiscopo sulle famiglie, which is a survey conducted since 1993 by ISTAT with the aim of collecting information about Italian citizens’ life. The indicators chosen have been synthesized through the MPI methodwhich allows the elaboration of a synthetic measure of a multidimensional phenomenon when each component cannot be replaced with the others. In this study, after having constructed an index of political participation, it was decided to correlate the participatory phenomenon with electoral participation in order to analyze the relationship between these two phenomena. Against all expectations, this study has shown a low correlation between the two phenomena, thus suggesting that most of the people involved in forms of conventional participation are not the same as those who go to the polling station