Silvio Berlusconi once described himself as “the Jesus Christ of politics,” and that occurred after only his second “resurrection” as Italy's prime minister. In April 2008, he recaptured that office for a third time, with more solid electoral and legislative majorities than before. When his current term ends in 2013, he will have been head of government for almost one-fifth of the life of the Italian Republic. This is a remarkable achievement for a businessman who entered politics in 1994, created a new party, named it “Go Italy,” staffed it electorally with employees from his own company, and, four months later, took the prime minister's oath of office. Ever since then, he has continued to amaze, frustrate and chagrin all those, at home and abroad, who scorn him as unfit to govern.

This book is not just another of the many explanations of why and how Berlusconi keeps returning to power. It is, rather, an impressive and, in my view, a much needed correction to overly facile claims about the effects on elections of modern systems of communication, and particularly of television. The authors do not believe, as others have claimed, that television by and large “nationalizes” politics to the point of rendering geography, or local conditions, of little electoral consequence. They reject conceptualizations that treat a given country as a single undifferentiated electoral constituency, most of whose citizens constitute a “model median national voter without much of a standard deviation” (p. 45).

Michael Shin and John Agnew recognize that the political subcultures that once determined the Italian voter's political party identity and electoral preference have largely disappeared. They are aware of and indeed rewardingly discuss the effects, some of them unintended and perverse, produced by several changes in Italy's electoral laws. And they concede what other scholars have shown regarding Berlusconi's Forza Italia (FI) Party, namely that electorally speaking, it is by far the most “national” in terms of the geographical spread of its electoral appeal.

Nevertheless, the authors contend, and this is the book's leitmotif, none of this warrants the conclusion that television in electoral campaigns has rendered negligible the impact of territory on electoral choices and outcomes. The book's most interesting chapters (3–5) are designed to show that a) like other political parties, FI does indeed have a distinctive “territorial character”; b) electoral “geographies can take forms other than the regional”; and c) “electorates remain, in different configurations over time, associated intimately with distinctively different geographical patterns of electoral choice” (p. 27).

The impact of place, the authors claim, is likely to be obscured if the search for “homogeneous” electoral patterns is conducted at a level where votes are aggregated by province, region or state, and if these patterns are in turn associated with static indicators like socioeconomic status and other census- or survey-derived data, or with concepts like “social capital.” As an alternative to such “compositional” treatments of electoral behavior, they posit a “contextual” approach. This requires attention to the “mediating role” in the determination of the voting decision played by the milieu, or the place, in which the individual voter resides, or in which he or she associates or interacts with others.

These milieux may include one's place of residence and the institutions (e.g., family, workplace, church, town, etc.) found there, but they are not necessarily limited to them. Shin and Agnew's methodology requires “dynamic place configuration”—meaning the identification of “the mix of local and extra-local social and economic influences that come together differently in different places and that change in their conditional effects as the influences themselves are shuffled and displaced over time” (p. 19). The point would be not to “freeze” voting patterns into rigidly defined political or electoral spaces, like those that are labeled “Red,” “Blue,” “White,” or are classified by other labels that give electoral geographical jurisdictions distinctive ideological coloration or party identity.

An overtone that runs through these pages is that one should avoid extrapolating to other political systems the propositions or axioms about politics that may be valid in the United States. The authors simply do not agree that in the case of Italy, evidence is strong that that country's electoral politics has been “Americanized.” For example, they note (pp. 51–53) that even if Italian television has grown enormously in electoral importance, it does not follow that this medium affects political parties or territorial politics there in the same way. We are once again reminded that the American parties are the outliers, including in the sense that, unlike elsewhere, they do not mediate between state and society.

The analytical chapters show us that if we look differently and more carefully within regions and province, we may well discern patterns that are both different from those found at the more inclusive level and also influenced by factors related to place. In each of these chapters, we find arresting depictions of the variations in electoral “colonization” and “mobilization” effected by the newer political parties in territories once dominated by the Christian Democratic or Communist Parties. We come away from this experience with a somewhat different, and perhaps keener, understanding of expressions like “all politics is local,” or “all parties are patronage parties.”

As the authors show, one aspect of Berlusconi's political acumen lies in his having created, for geographical reasons, not one electoral coalition but two of them. One of them, in the North, is with Umberto Bossi and his Northern League; the other is with Gianfranco Fini and his National Alliance. Results of the 2008 elections basically confirm the book's major argument.

One might wish that there were more in this book that analyzes variations in the way “dynamic place configuration” generates alternative electoral configurations. But this may be a topic for a sequel. In the meantime, reading this one is highly recommended.