Non-Voting Party and Wage Inequalities: Long-Term Evidence from Italy

By means of a long-run analysis on electoral and inequality data, this article shows that thereexists a temporal correlation between inequalities and non-voting behaviour. Non-voting isprogressively becoming a widespread phenomenon, beyond specific national contexts, andchallenges the functioning of democracies in advanced capitalist countries. Notably, data onelectoral results in Italy do not show a clear leading group of non-voters. Although historicallyconcentrated in southern Italy and predominantly female, non-voters are proportionallyincreasing in the centre and in the north of the country, independently of the genderdimension. The root causes of the phenomenon should be traced back not only to the politicaland institutional dimension, but also to a widespread socio-economic determinant, namelylabour market inequality, the driver addressed in this article.