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Italy’s 1992 elections marked the end of political dominance by Christian Democracy (DC). The conventional account of the collapse of the DC’s vote to less than 30% focuses on the breakup of the Soviet Union, which is said to have freed Catholic voters to switch to new regionalist protest parties. The author documents that this argument is empirically inadequate. Evidence shows that electoral districts more exposed to international trade were where the DC lost larger vote shares and where the Northern League received more support. These findings corroborate that social groups linked to small firms in the north and center whose products were exported throughout Europe underwent electoral realignment in response to the economic opportunities offered by the 1991 Maastricht Treaty. The author argues that DC was not credible in providing national macroeconomic policies that would have allowed Italy to partake fully of the opportunities offered by European economic integration.
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