Capire il comportamento di voto: dalla debolezza dei fattori «sociologici» all’insostenibile tesi dell’individualizzazione

In the present paper we analyze the evolution of the relation between the vote in the political election in Italy and the following six structural factors: social class, religion, geographical area, age, gender and education. Considered time span is the forty years period between 1968 and 2008. We chose to carry out the analysis of the six factors using the same technique, thus allowing us to study the single and comparable effect of the variables at hand. Results confirm that every factors taken into consideration lost a great deal of their influence on the vote over time, and in particular religion and gender. Many scholars have interpreted these results in terms of individualization of the political choices and have focalized their attention on individual cognitive process in a rational choice frame. We criticize this interpretation claiming for the need to unfold new and meaningful social entities as sources of political identification.To reach this goal, we finally put forward the proposal to study the networks of personal relations as fuzzy categories of identification and lifestyles as forms through which they are expressed.