Companies that engage in harmful practices threaten democracy by eroding trust in institutions. Left unchecked, their actions weaken citizens’ confidence, undermining the foundation of a healthy political system.
The case of the ILVA steel plant in Taranto
When corporations engage in harmful practices that compromise the well-being of workers, communities, and the environment, they damage livelihoods and undermine fundamental human rights. For example, residents living near a polluting factory may face severe health issues, unsafe working conditions can lead to incidents and fatalities, and environmental degradation can disrupt the quality of life or livelihood prospects for entire communities. While these impacts are well-documented, there is less understanding of how such violations impact democracy, particularly by shaping affected citizens’ political participation, such as their electoral choices.
We explored this issue in Taranto, a city in southern Italy overlooking the Mediterranean. Since the mid-1960s, Taranto has borne the heavy burden of hosting a major steel plant, known as ILVA. The plant, while providing a critical source of employment, has simultaneously subjected the population to decades of toxic emissions, including carcinogenic pollutants. These emissions have contributed to alarming rates of cancer and rare diseases, including among the town’s youth. In July 2012, judicial authorities ordered the plant’s seizure after mounting evidence of environmental and health damage.
This marked a turning point for the local community. Despite earlier warnings from environmental groups, it was only after the 2012 events that many citizens fully grasped the devastating scale of the harm inflicted by the plant. Due to the scale of the plant and its impacts, the ILVA case also attracted the attention of the international press. And, in 2022 Taranto was listed by the United Nations among what it called “sacrifice zones” – extremely contaminated areas where vulnerable and marginalized groups bear a disproportionate burden of the health, human rights and environmental consequences of exposure to pollution and hazardous substances.
Exposure to pollution influences democratic participation
We combined statistical analyses of electoral and pollution data from 2012 to 2022 with qualitative insights from interviews conducted with Taranto residents. Our findings reveal a significant shift in electoral behaviour, as citizens began to identify themselves as victims of corporate wrongdoing.
Our analysis shows that citizens residing in neighbourhoods more heavily exposed to ILVA’s pollution —measured not only by physical proximity to the plant but also accounting for other factors like weather conditions (e.g. prevailing winds) and the geomorphology of the area—were significantly more likely to abstain from voting. This trend persists over time, even after accounting for various other characteristics of these neighbourhoods.
We also found that affected citizens had moved away from traditional political parties, redirecting their electoral support toward a new national political group – the 5 Star Movement. This populist movement capitalized on the crisis with explicit campaign promises to shut down the steel plant and resolve Taranto’s environmental issues. At the local level, however, activists joining the movement grounded their advocacy on scientific evidence leveraging technical expertise from scientists invited to document ILVA’s pollution, thus creating local consensus on scientific grounds, which is not usual among populist parties.
The appeal of promises to shut down the plant underscores how environmental injustices can disrupt established political alignments and foster support for non-traditional political actors offering seemingly straightforward solutions to complex problems. However, our study also finds that these new political groups eventually struggled to handle the complex challenges they promised to fix, largely because national leaders of the populist party were not able to fulfill their promises, creating an additional wave of discontent among its local representatives. We found that when these new parties fail to deliver on their election promises, citizens are more frustrated. This can further erode trust in politics and deepen the already low confidence people have in national leaders and institutions.
What can be done to safeguard democracy?
Political leaders committed to safeguarding democratic principles, values, and the stability of democratic systems should aim to prevent business-related human rights violations within their territories, regions, and cities. Allowing such harm to occur can ultimately undermine the stability of the institutions that brought them to power. The 2024 Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive offers national governments and sub-national authorities a framework to regulate the business sector, ensuring the protection of human rights and, ultimately, the preservation of democracies.
