partisani

Taken from my friend Fredrik’s blog, here is a graphic which maps the political allegiances of Italian football support groups. Fan organizations are common in European sports- and range from student drinking societies to labor movement affiliated social clubs to ultra-violent “hooligan”-style gangs. To read the map, “Sinistra” means “left”, and “Destra” means “right.” You’ll notice that some clubs have two or more support groups of opposing ideological alignment. No doubt this makes for tougher conflict in the stands and beyond, but also says something about the partisan stratification which has marked Italian society since the first world war. While in the U.S. we have just begun to regard ourselves as a nation divided between Red and Blue, Italy has been Red, Blue and Black for generations.
I paused on this graphic because my academic work has of late focused on the meaning, depth and function of partisanship in the United States. Even here, where partisan identity is thought to be weak and transitive, and where many voters jealously covet their “independence”, partisan identity is deep and actually quite slow to change. A great new book by political scientists Donald Green, Bradley Palmquist and Eric Schickler called Partisan Hearts and Minds makes the strong case for reevaluating the conventional wisdom. Americans, they argue, are profoundly partisan creatures, and party identity links closely with class, cultural, racial and regional fields of group consciousness. In fact, Italy is used as a comparative case in their exhaustive evaluation of previous studies and reevaluation of available data. This is a must read for political sociologists, and for political activists who are reticent about wading into party politics. In fact, it is in the act of partisan identification that a whole host of core ideological and identity questions are nested. While American political parties certainly don’t look like European ones in their behavior in the halls of government, on the ground they are not so very different.