Italy

This study asks whether far‑right electoral victories change how street‑level bureaucrats treat minority service seekers, focusing on registration with general practitioners in Italian municipalities. It combines an audit-style field experiment that varied callers’ accents with a regression discontinuity design around close mayoral elections to compare responses in places where far‑right candidates narrowly won versus lost. The central contribution is evidence about whether electoral outcomes at the municipal level are associated with changes in bureaucratic impartiality in a concrete public-service interaction.

The authors study how members of regional cabinets in Italy move between levels of government or leave politics, using an original dataset to test whether political‑institutional or personal factors shape those career trajectories. The study focuses on ordinary‑statute Italian regions and compares upward moves (to national or European posts), downward moves (to provincial or municipal offices) and exits from politics.

This paper asks whether features of party organization help explain Italy’s mixed performance on multiple dimensions of democratic quality, and how Italy compares to other liberal democracies over time. Focusing on two party organizational features—personalization and institutionalization—the authors first map Italy’s ups and downs across democratic dimensions relative to other liberal democracies. They then use regression analysis to test how variation in party personalization and institutionalization relates to measures of democratic quality.

This study examines how income changes affected voter turnout across different socioeconomic groups in Northern Italy during the economic crisis following the Great Recession. Using unique administrative data from a large northern Italian municipality, we matched ten years of individual tax records with voter rolls. This allowed us to track both overall levels and within-individual changes over time. Our findings highlight three key points: Income and turnout levels dropped disproportionately among relatively poor citizens during the Great Recession. Changes in income consistently influenced voting behavior, though this effect was modest on average due to diminishing returns. However, it proved significantly consequential for lower-income voters. The decline specifically affected economically insecure voters, worsening pre-existing turnout inequalities and suggesting potential reciprocal reinforcement between income inequality and political participation. We situate these findings within Italy's strong civic traditions and generally low barriers to voting. These results have important implications for theories concerning descriptive representation and the functioning of unequal democracies.

This paper examines how Italian political parties positioned themselves on the European Union's response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, focusing on four response dimensions: sanctions on Russia, military support for Ukraine, EU enlargement to include Ukraine, and reception of Ukrainian refugees. The study combines theory-driven expectations from cleavage politics, the inverted U curve and differentiated politicisation with an inductive reading of parties' social-media output to assess whether party family or Europeanist/Eurosceptic divides better explain variation in party stances.

This study asks whether electoral discrimination against minority candidates reflects negative stereotypes about those candidates or positive stereotypes about majority candidates — in other words, whether in-group favoritism explains electoral bias. Using an original moderation-of-process survey experiment in Italy, the author examines electoral responses to immigrant-origin candidates and the role stereotypes play in shaping those responses. The paper's central contribution is to shift attention from solely negative stereotyping of minorities to the possibility that positive evaluations of majority candidates produce electoral advantages for them.

This study asks whether a change of government altered interest groups’ ability to attain policy preferences in Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), comparing the Conte Draft with the Draghi Plan. Using public statements from 20 main Italian interest groups, the authors present a within-case longitudinal comparison of how groups appraised the NRRP across the two versions.

This study asks whether the gender gap documented in international political science publishing also exists within Italian political science. To avoid cross-country comparability problems common in prior work (which often compares U.S. publication rates to U.S. workforce data), a single-country approach is used to evaluate whether a ‘‘glass-ceiling’’ persists for political scientists who aim to publish their research.

Belief in alternative accounts of SARS‑CoV‑2’s origin—claims that the virus was created by humans, intentionally or accidentally—spread alongside the scientific consensus of zoonotic spillover. These alternative accounts fit the family of conspiracy theories because they posit secretive groups acting in self-interest and against the public good.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented challenges globally. While citizens suffered, leaders often saw approval rise during initial crisis phases. This research investigates how international events influence domestic politics by analyzing the timing of Italy's March 9 lockdown against ongoing surveys in France, Germany, Poland, and Spain.

Prior research on how negative news affects voter turnout has produced mixed results. This study tests whether exposure to negative media coverage changes citizens' propensity to vote, and whether that effect differs between first-order (national) and second-order (European Parliament) elections.

This study examines career concerns in Italian academia by modeling academic promotion as a contest. The theoretical framework uses the standard contest model formalized as a multiunit all-pay auction. In this framework, the following parameters determine academics' effort and output:

Civilian victimization in conventional civil wars and conflicts with insurgencies is driven by the vulnerability of incumbent forces during shifting front lines. This vulnerability stems from informational uncertainty and unstable supply chains, increasing their exposure to risks.

Political decision-making often relies on arbitrary population thresholds to determine local government structures. This article examines how such rules shape municipal governance across different European contexts.

The formation of the “yellow‑green” Conte I government—an unexpected coalition between the Five Star Movement and the League after Italy’s 4 March 2018 election—appeared puzzling because the partners seemed far apart on the conventional left–right scale. This article shows that the puzzle arises from relying on a unidimensional left–right representation of party positions and resolves it by introducing a second policy dimension.

What explains the apparent negative agenda power of governing coalitions in Italy?