The Italian party system’s three functional arenas after the 2018 election: the tsunami after the earthquake

The aim of this article is to assess to what extent the ‘change’ after the 2018 Italian election can be observed in the electoral, parliamentary and governmental arenas. We use the indicators of party ‘volatility’ and ‘innovation’ to measure the change in each arena. The time span is the period 1948–2018, with a specific focus on the time after the watershed election of 1994. In this respect, we have identified a crucial difference between the 1994 change and that of 2013–18: if 1994 was the single moment of passage from one party system to another, in the 2010s the change did not happen in a single moment. Only after the next election, if volatility and innovation in the three arenas is reduced substantially, could we claim that a new party system has developed, that could be considered the ‘third party system’ of the Italian Republic.