The issue of determining – and, in fact, of defining – the popularity of a political figure is, even today, an extremely complex one. Polls, analytics and various different metrics which appear to produce viable results are mostly dedicated to establishing trends in popularity, rather than an absolute “popularity index”. Also, popularity is subject to change, to fluctuation, for many different reasons – some dependent on the initiatives of the political force or personality whose popularity we wish to investigate, and others external and conjunctural.

In order to assess Mussolini's popularity, of course, most of these instruments are unavailable, as – at the time – these investigation tools were either absent, in their infancy, or are ill-suited to the specific traits of the Regime. Which means that we have a comparatively easier job in dealing with fewer intricacies, and a comparatively much harder job, in so far that not only we have less material available, but also that we need to rely in good measure on the “consensus investigation” conducted by the Regime itself.

The first, and most obvious, source of information are police and surveillance reports. These are – always – a problematic instrument, as, to put it in the simplest terms, political consensus and “public order consensus” are not the same thing, and police reports are concerned, even under Fascism, first and foremost with the latter. An additional source of information can be found in the more general informative reports compiled by prefects, local authorities and podestà, as well as by public functionaries and delegates.

What they paint is a picture of “broad consensus” towards the Regime, shaken – more than by the limited impact of political dissidents – by economical fluctuations with their repercussions on occupation and social stability.

Such a picture needs nonetheless to be characterized more in depth, as – outside from the always present extremes of the adamant supporters and the adamant opponents of the Regime – one of the dominating factors in establishing a consensus to the Regime was the vast basin of “informal” consensus, from those who approved of Fascism without being enthusiastically supportive of it to those who disapproved of it without actively operating against it, which would be the popular counterpart to the political phenomenon of the so called fiancheggiatori, the “external supporters”. In this area, consensus, tolerance and coercion are difficult to distinguish and may very well transmute into each other at different stages of the Regime's life.

As Paul Corner noted in his The Fascist Party and popular opinion

The word “consensus” is used little here, not because the question of popular attitudes to the regime is not important, but because the term itself is inadequate to describe the complexities of popular attitudes towards and within a would-be totalitarian regime in which coercion, direct or implicit, is always the conditioning context.

In other words, in investigating – in seeking a metric for – the consensus or popularity of Mussolini and of the Regime, we are bound to run into the issue that we have much more viable instruments to establish and measure consensus than we have in measuring dissent.

Consider for instance one of the most direct instrument we have available: the letters and petitions to Mussolini's personal secretary. These letters offer an effective instrument to investigate which measures taken by Mussolini were deemed more effective, which ones were comparatively less popular, and which situations were deemed problematic enough to call for Mussolini's direct attention (an issue, this last one, which is a recurrent element of the internal frictions within the Party and State administration bodies). But they do very little in informing us of Mussolini's unpopularity, as no one would seriously consider writing to Mussolini in order to berate him.

For instance, the impressive amount of letters of praise – some carrying truly pathetic accents – for Mussolini's “mastery of international affairs” after the Conference of Munich, celebrating his accomplishment in upholding the European peace, are an obvious testimony of popularity (and perhaps the last high point of Mussolini's popularity with the masses), but also a revelation of a general discomfort with the perspective of a general conflict which Mussolini himself interpreted in an extremely negative way, as an expression of “consensus weakness” rather than strength.

In this sense – and again referencing Corner's recent work (but the theme is very present in De Felice as well as in other particular examinations of the internal dynamics of Fascism) – one needs to operate a distinction between Mussolini's personal popularity and that of the Party, as well as that of Fascism in general. For various reasons, some structural and some operational, Mussolini's personal stature vastly outranked that of the Party and, indeed, in certain critical phases, the Party's reputation – by which, as noted by Corner, many people usually referred to their own local Party and functionaries – evolved in direct opposition to that of Mussolini. The more corrupt, inept and petty the local notables appeared, the more significant, beneficial and necessary Mussolini's presence and closeness became. The “if the Duce knew about this!” mirrored a commonly held belief that – all things considered – Mussolini was better than the others, and therefore able to maintain and, to an extent, increase his popularity even when the general consensus for Fascism was faltering.

That the local powers, and groups – after their impressive rise of the early 1920s and subsequent memberships landslide – struggled to penetrate effectively the local and traditional structures of power, and ultimately failed to reform and renovate them, is taken by Corner as one of the central elements of the ultimate “consensus crisis” of Fascism.

This crisis nonetheless became manifest quite late in the Regime's life and – if we follow De Felice – only after the war appeared destined to be long and likely to resolve unfavorably for Italy. Which is to say that Fascism had to absorb and “digest” many structural elements of the social and political life of Italy – of which the center-periphery dialectics is certainly a very prominent one – as it aspired to incorporate all “legitimate” national instances within the Fascist State, which is to say that Fascism also had to metabolize consensus and dissent, popularity and criticism in itself. A perspective on popularity and consensus therefore can't really abstract from an examination of the Fascist Regime as a whole, and does not, from my point of view, allow for a direct analogy to the conceits of popularity in a democratic regime.

Concluding I hope I managed to highlight a few issues with investigating Mussolini's popularity as well as certain traits of what can be interpreted either as widespread and generalized consensus or as meek and indifferent tolerance, and that was probably comprised of both, tendencies and attitudes which fluctuated and transmuted into each other; a magma of “consensus” above which Mussolini was able to stand out and to maintain the myth of the Duce, if not to exactly control what this myth entailed, until almost the very end.