SISP Conference 2021

Matteo Salvini's Lega back in government: towards a reconfiguration of the Italian center-right? By: Mariana Polizzi (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) Abstract (please check out the file (if needed) for more details on the article) The purpose of this article is to study the transformation of the Lega Nord party (Lega Salvini Premier) in Italy during the 2020-2021 biennium, which coincided with the Covid19 crisis in the world, but focusing mainly on Italy, one of the countries most affected at a (European and) global level by the current pandemic. During this period, we consider that the party led by Matteo Salvini gradually abandons the (much more) confrontational strategy against the Conte bis government, in pursuit of an alignment with the new government coalition headed by Mario Draghi, where Fratelli D'Italia (led by Giorgia Meloni, partner of Salvini himself in the center-right coalition) remains the main opposition party. Based on the analysis of The League’s (and its leader Salvini) media feed (speech & social media), we conclude that the strategy adopted by Salvini to participate in the new government that emerged in 2021 is impacting the Lega in three main ways: 1) abandoning the most radicalized discourse of 2020, in pursuit of Salvini himself as a future electoral option and as efficient co-ruler; 2) this adopted change brings Salvini's Lega closer to positions more similar to those of its other center-right partner: Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia, with a decided neo-conservative liberal stamp; and 3) this passage from radicalization to support for the new government has brought the Lega a decline in electoral approval, in favor of Meloni and his political party (which has a much more consolidated and perennial ideological structure in the past). weather). Key Words: Fratelli D'Italia; Lega Nord; Radical Right; Italian Politics; Souverainism

Recent years, Turkish political regime has been transformed from a parliamentary system into a presidential regime. Besides the electoral change and its usual output through the political regime, there has occurred some typical –or irregular- behaviours on the political parties’ attitudes in terms of their ideological consistency and capability of mobilization. Currently, two political party blocs and one loosely attached party are existing in Turkish party politics. In this paper presentation, it is briefly discussed the policymaking and mobilization capability of the blocs and parties of current Turkish politics in comparison with their elbow rooms and ideological consistencies. This discussion presents some meta-data about the near future transformation of Turkish party politics on drafting its political and electoral platforms. Due to two unusual factors in the newly founded regime, Turkish party politics conceivably is opened several risks on stability of its politics. However, there may be burst a couple of relative advantages as the result of regime change and external factors.

Right-wing parties appear to be updating their electoral strategies throughout the series of crises from the 2008-2013 economic crisis, the 2015-2018 refugee crisis, and onto the 2020-present COVID-19 pandemic. Recent research has demonstrated the centre right parties have been exploiting the immigration issue to hold off far-right challengers. In response, although the key issue dimension of immigration as an electoral strategy continues to serve as the raison d’etre of far-right politics, newer far-right strategies are being introduced to mobilize supporters, such as the post-materialist issue of environmentalism (i.e.: eco-nationalism), with increasing success. We therefore ask: to what extent are far-right party strategies in Europe being updated across these crises and does this translate into electoral success for far-right parties? Using a case study approach alongside quantitative data on party positions that is supplemented with elite interviews (with far-right politicians), we examine far-right parties’ electoral strategies in Western Europe (Italy and France) alongside Central-Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland & Slovakia) in the post-2018 EU Refugee crisis period. Our preliminary evidence identifies four main patterns of party strategies for the modern far-right in Europe that has important implications for liberal democracy. Far-Right Parties; Right-Wing Party Competition; Europe; Crisis; Liberal Democracy

Nel ritratto di famiglia delle democrazie occidentali l’Italia è il paese del governo debole. Partorito da una Costituzione attenta soprattutto a limitarne i tratti potenzialmente autoritari e dunque laconica (e lacunosa) sulla figura del capo dell’esecutivo; cresciuto per cinquant’anni in balìa dei partiti; sembra essere entrato nel nuovo secolo finalmente a gamba tesa nella misura del rafforzamento del suo vertice. ?Gli anni che vanno dalla fine degli Ottanta all’inizio del decennio successivo hanno segnato il primo significativo cambio di passo. Fattori esterni di lunga durata come il crollo del comunismo e il processo di integrazione europea hanno portato alla ridefinizione del sistema politico italiano e all’emersione, è il caso di dire, dell’attore governo. I fattori interni, a partire dalla crisi inesorabile dei partiti storici e dalla conseguente ondata di antipolitica, sono stati ancora più dirompenti e hanno dato così il via alla cosiddetta Seconda Repubblica. Una Repubblica a costituzione invariata, nella quale prende sempre più forma (e forza) il potere personale, segnando il lungo ma definitivo addio al «secolo dei partiti». Il processo di personalizzazione della politica che attraversa tutti gli anni Novanta, con la forza di un vero e proprio «virus», attaccherà dall’interno i due corpi collettivi dello stato: partiti e parlamento.? Questo paper affronterà il tema del potere normativo del governo italiano, concentrandosi in particolare sui decreti del presidente del consiglio negli ultimi 20 anni per arrivare ad un’analisi dettagliata del governo della pandemia. Dopo la parte introduttiva sul rafforzamento dell’attore governo nel sistema politico e sulle trasformazioni che hanno portato all’emergere di un faticoso ma ineluttabile ‘premierato’ italiano, la seconda parte sarà dedicata agli strumenti legislativi del Presidente del Consiglio, cercando di farsi strada nella selva inesplorata ma sempre più fitta dei DPCM, gli atti amministrativi emanati direttamente dal capo dell’esecutivo. Il focus si sposterà, nella terza parte, sul governo delle prime due fasi della pandemia gestite dal governo Conte II (gennaio-settembre e ottobre-febbraio, fino alla sua crisi) e sugli strumenti normativi e regolatori utilizzati che hanno posto nuovi interrogativi sul funzionamento delle nostre istituzioni democratiche. Temi quali la legittimità della normazione dell’emergenza, con il ricorso continuo ai DPCM; lo stesso rapporto tra governo e parlamento; la limitazione dei diritti e delle libertà individuali, hanno coinvolto in maniera molto partecipata l’opinione pubblica – e non solo la dottrina e la scienza politica – nel dibattito sul rischio di un deficit democratico. Nella parte conclusiva, infine, si farà il punto sul processo di monocratizzazione dell’esecutivo italiano alla luce del governo dell’emergenza.

Fino a pochi anni fa quella francese sembrava essere una ‘eccezione’: uno dei pochi sistemi del capitalismo maturo a non essere se non toccato quantomeno travolto dalla doppia pressione che populismo e tecnocrazia stanno imprimendo alla sfera dell'autonomia democratica. Questo grazie anche ad un modello politico-istituzionale che pareva proteggesse il paese nel mare aperto della open society e della global economy. La lunga coda dell’austerity, la crisi della globalizzazione ‘felice’, in ultimo la crisi pandemica, ne hanno rivelato, tuttavia, le debolezze. L’operazione con cui in pochi mesi Emmanuel Macron, enfant prodige (et protégé) dell’establishment, fonda un partito personale “che non dice il suo nome” e stravince le elezioni presidenziali evidenzia, infatti, la permeabilità della democrazia francese a nuove logiche che si direbbero tecnocratiche e neo-individualiste. Il paper muove una ipotesi critica provocatoria, supportata da un quadro di evidenze, sulla profondità dei processi di personalizzazione e monocratizzazione che il macrocosmo propone al sistema della Quinta Repubblica. Il frame analitico ed empirico è sviluppato sugli ambiti elettorale, rappresentativo ed esecutivo, con un focus addizionale dedicato al governo della pandemia. Con la politica di Macron che emerge quale nuovo, possibile paradigma di personalizzazione per la tarda globalizzazione, in cui spinte tecnocratiche e neo-individualiste si mescolano con un obiettivo che sembra essere quello di rafforzare l'agenda economico-sociale neoliberale.

Non esiste un paese europeo che, nell’arco di poco più di un decennio, abbia dovuto affrontare un numero tanto rilevante di crisi, peraltro di diversa natura, come accaduto di recente nel Regno Unito. Dalla «grande recessione» scoppiata nel 2008 alle «grande epidemia» del 2020, passando per il trauma della Brexit, il sistema politico del Regno Unito è stato sottoposto a una serie di sfide e trasformazioni che hanno scosso alle fondamenta i canoni del tradizionale “modello Westminster”: la centralità del parlamento, la rappresentanza politica, il bipartitismo e l’esercizio e i limiti della sovranità popolare. Questo paper intende, dunque, analizzare le trasformazioni avvenute nel Regno Unito nel corso degli ultimi trent’anni, all’interno di un quadro analitico che tiene assieme sia le dimensioni istituzionali che quelle più strettamente politiche. Il paper si suddivide in tre parti. La prima si concentra sulla figura del Primo ministro e, in particolare, sulle ragioni strutturali e congiunturali che l’hanno resa il nuovo centro di gravità della politica britannica. La seconda parte è dedicata al tema dell’emergenza sanitaria innescata dalla pandemia e, nello specifico, alla crescita dei poteri nelle mani dell’esecutivo che essa ha comportato e delle reazioni prodotte sulle altre istituzioni rappresentative. Infine, nella terza parte si propone un bilancio complessivo dei mutamenti del “modello Westminster” e sul nuovo equilibrio istituzionale che si è venuto a creare al suo interno. In questo caso, non si tratterà soltanto di registrare il passaggio da un modello di democrazia all’altro, ma di valutare l’impatto di queste trasformazioni sullo stato di salute della democrazia rappresentativa British-style.

Negli ultimi anni il tema della polarizzazione ha assunto una rinnovata centralità nell’analisi politologica su scala globale. Dal contesto americano a quello europeo, numerosi studiosi hanno indagato il fenomeno proponendone letture innovative che, in continuità o in contrapposizione agli studi classici (Sartori 1976; Dalton 2008; Jacobson 2004; Fiorina et al. 2008; Abramowitz e McCoy 2019), lo hanno riportato al centro dell’agenda di ricerca. Questo paper intende porre alcune domande di ricerca volte a comprendere e valutare l’interesse euristico di questo concetto per lo studio delle istituzioni politiche, con particolare riferimento al caso italiano. L’analisi teorica ed empirica del caso italiano contribuisce, infatti, a mettere meglio a fuoco le principali caratteristiche della polarizzazione e le dinamiche di connessione con il funzionamento dei sistemi democratici in generale (Sani e Sartori 1978; Pappalardo 1996). Per queste ragioni, la prima parte del contributo sarà dedicata ad una rassegna critica della letteratura volta a fare chiarezza sugli aspetti definitori del concetto e a discutere le modalità con cui viene misurato. La seconda sezione si concentrerà sul caso italiano indagando sia i principali contributi della letteratura di riferimento che i suoi effetti e le conseguenze sul sistema politico. Su questa linea, l’ultima sezione propone alcune prospettive d’analisi aperte a futuri approfondimenti.

Il potere monocratico alla prova delle sfide cibernetiche L’esperienza italiana in prospettiva comparata Da tempo considerata da molti osservatori emergenza democratica essa stessa, la sicurezza cibernetica si è imposta come uno dei banchi di prova più significativi per i leader di governo alle prese con la crisi pandemica e con i suoi devastanti effetti. Garantire l’inviolabilità delle infrastrutture critiche è diventato un obiettivo strategico a tutti i livelli di esercizio dei poteri di governo, nonché tassello cruciale delle dinamiche geopolitiche globali. Come riconfermato in maniera eclatante dal recentissimo attacco alla Colonial Pipeline, con il conseguente arresto di uno dei più importanti oleodotti statunitensi, le politiche per la cybersecurity mettono in gioco – e chiamano in causa – le fondamenta dell’esercizio dell’autorità politica e le fonti della sua legittimazione. L’ordine esecutivo del Presidente Biden per rivedere la strategia cyber dimostra che le sfide cibernetiche toccano il cuore dei governi, e il complesso dell’architettura istituzionale entro cui esso opera. Obiettivo del presente paper è quello di analizzare le politiche per la cybersecurity che in Italia, nel pieno della emergenza da Covid-19, si stanno affermando, forse segnando un cambio di passo anche rispetto al recente passato. In particolare, l’analisi prenderà in esame le scelte di indirizzo politico e i provvedimenti – normativi e regolamentari - per la ridefinizione/riorganizzazione della macchina di governo del cyberspazio effettuate dai Presidenti del Consiglio Conte e Draghi. Un’analisi che permetterà di mettere in discussione, grazie anche a un raffronto con altre esperienze nazionali, in primis con quella americana, se su questo terreno il potere monocratico si è andato consolidando, e quali sono le implicazioni di questi sviluppi dal punto di vista della cultura e della prassi democratiche.

Tra i capi di governo delle democrazie parlamentari, il cancelliere tedesco è di norma considerato come uno dei più influenti e capace di determinare la politica nazionale. Al contempo, è stato però più volte osservato come l’azione politica del governo federale in Germania sia limitata in modo sostanziale dalla struttura federale dello stato, che concede ampia autonomia ai governi statali (Länder) in diversi settori di policy. Tra questi, rientra l’ambito sanitario. Non stupisce dunque che, a fronte della sfida mondiale della pandemia di Covid-19, la Germania si sia trovata di fronte al dilemma di come implementare una strategia di contenimento della diffusione del virus il più possibile coerente su tutto il territorio federale, al contempo lasciando intatti spazi di manovra garantiti ai Länder. Ne è emersa una gestione della crisi nella quale la cancelliera Angela Merkel ha giocato un ruolo centrale, nonostante i numerosi vincoli istituzionali ai quali è sottoposto il cancelliere. In particolare, dopo una iniziale difficoltà di coordinamento tra livello federale di governo e livello statale (ossia regionale), Angela Merkel è stata determinante, nella primavera del 2021, nel favorire nuove forme di accentramento della gestione della crisi, che sono sfociate nella modifica della legge federale sulla protezione delle infezioni (Infektionsschutzgesetz) e nella conseguente adozione di misure federali valide su tutto il territorio tedesco. Utilizzando la letteratura sulla presidenzializzazione dei sistemi parlamentari e quella sulla ‘political crisis leadership’, il paper indaga come ciò sia stato possibile. I risultati mostrano che Angela Merkel è riuscita a personalizzare la gestione della crisi sulla spinta di un processo (seppur relativo) di monocratizzazione, in atto da alcuni anni in Germania e che ha portato nel tempo a un accrescimento per via informale della capacità decisionale del cancelliere.

The presidentialization of politics can be considered among the key processes of transformation in contemporary democracies. As a well-established scholarship pointed out, European integration has represented a critical enabling condition of this process, favouring the consolidation of national leaders and cabinets in terms of power resources and autonomy. A recent wave of studies has showed also that, in response to the global financial crisis of 2008, the EU established new governance mechanisms that has strengthened further not only the national executive but also the supranational, i.e. the European Council and the Commission. Against this background, the peper aims to investigate whether, and to what extent, the coronavirus crisis opened a window of opportunity to redefine institutional equilibria by favouring the executive branch and thus adding to the rise of ‘monocratic powers’. Driven by this research interest, the present contribution focuses on the cases of Italy and Germany in order to investigate, through the analysis of legal and institutional mechanisms implemented since the outbreak of the pandemic, especially in the domain of economic policy, if at stake is a step forward in strengthening executive powers.

The existing literature points to a variety of reasons why, as income inequality grows, the parliamentary representation of the poorest segments of society should be negatively affected. One of the strongest claims made by populist parties is that they provide a solution to the existing representation gap afflicting liberal democracies: they champion the interests of the marginalised against the elites willing to protect the status quo. This study aims at testing this assertion by exploring the issue attention of populist parties in parliament. We ask whether and to what extent populist parties are more likely to address issues related to the assistance of the poor. The empirical analysis focuses on political parties’ issue attention in parliament using data on the policy content of parliamentary oral questions and prime ministers’ annual speeches in seven European countries (Belgium, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain). The topic coding is based on the Comparative Agendas Project methodology.

This paper analyses the link between migration flows, migration mood, and migration policy in Italy in the last thirty years. We examine if the public recognises and responds to changing levels of migration, if migration policies change in response to the public mood, and whether changing policies have effects on migration levels. We also analyse whether these processes change over time, and how that relates to the changing salience of migration. Ultimately, we examine the interaction between policy problems, public opinion, and policy responses - and the feedback between political processes and real-world migration dynamics. To generate long-term series of flows, mood, and policy, our analysis combines data from multiple sources. We rely on official statistics to reconstruct inflows of different types of migrant groups. We use both official indicators and indexes developed by scholarly projects to generate time series of migration policies. We rely on survey data to build a long-term series of migration mood, and for recent years we complement them with high-frequency Twitter data.

The budget is one of the most fundamental moments and documents of a country, where policy-makers decide about the allocation of expenditure for the following years, taking into consideration not only their policy preferences but also the long-term needs of the population. In ‘normal times’, policy-maker are freer to implement their favourite policies, acting as ‘agenda-setter’. Although the total size of the budget tends to be incremental and characterized by very tiny changes, political actors have higher leeway in moving expenditure from one budget category to another. This paper is a preliminary attempt to approach the study of budget trade-offs looking at spending allocation across budget categories as compositional dependent variable by foregrounding the interdependence of decisions about public expenditure and surrounding the whole decision-making process. We develop our analysis by focusing and comparing public expenditure of Italy and United Kingdom from 2013 to 2019. We then triangulate our results with those coming from the study of parliamentary debates. Our goal -- at this very preliminary stage -- is to verify whether a direct connection between the topics emphasized in parliamentary debates and the expenditure across budget categories exists. To do that, the recently released corpora of the ParlaMint project are investigated. Including the analysis of parliamentary debates into the study of budgetary changes is crucial, as political parties exploit the parliamentary arena to strategically emphasize their policy position and because is in the parliament that political conflicts unfold and also both majority and opposition parties can shape government’s decisions. The combined analysis of parliamentary debates and of the final expenditure, carried out by adding quantitative text analysis techniques to the study of expenditure trade-offs, despite its preliminary stage, helps to better grasp dynamics which public budgeting is subject to and constitutes a very promising venue for future research both for political science and linguistic scholars.

The claim for an equal representation of women in political institutions in Italy has entered the debate quite forcefully in the last few decades. Yet, as witnessed by the recent composition of the Draghi Government (13th February 2021), which includes only eight female ministers out of a total of twenty-three, gender balance in representation is far from constituting a well-established feature of Italian executives. Since 2013, the presence of women among Italian ministers was steadily over the 27% - with a few cases exceeding the 30%, i.e., the Renzi government (2014) which achieved equality being initially composed by 8 male and 8 female ministers - certainly indicating some recent steps towards gender equality in comparison to previous experiences. However, the mere increase of female ministers does not tell us the full story about the role of gender in cabinet composition. Ministerial posts vary in terms of the influence they exert in the cabinet and the amount of resources they give access to. Based on data collected on the career and personal background of Italian Ministers (2013-2021), our paper explores the gendered differentiation in the appointment to ministerial posts and finds that women are more frequently appointed to less prestigious and less powerful ministry and to ministry dealing with stereotypically ‘feminine’ issues.

In all democracies, political executives experience instances of ministerial turnover, either when a new cabinet team is formed after the resignation of the former or because of more or less substantial reshuffles that take place during the executive’s lifetime. In parliamentary systems, cabinet reshuffles are widely understood to rank among the most powerful tools that a prime minister has to keep ministers accountable, and to avoid ministerial policy drifts. This is most visible in Westminster systems where single-party (majority) cabinets usually govern under the leadership of a prime minister who is also party leader; it is no surprise, then, that most of the literature on cabinet reshuffles in parliamentary democracies has focused on this type of democratic regime. However, cabinet reshuffles mark frequent occurrences also in many coalition governments where prime ministers need to accommodate different party demands and ministers operate under a regime of ‘double delegation’ (from prime ministers and the coalition parties). This paper seeks to address and fill the apparent gaps in the study of cabinet reshuffles in parliamentary systems by designing a typology. The aim is two-fold: to systematize the scattered knowledge of real-world cabinet reshuffles and to offer preliminary sparks for developing a theory of the effects of reshuffles on politics and policy. Based on the framework of principal-agent theory, the paper distinguishes between ‘pro-active’ and ‘re-active’ forms of reshuffles and moves beyond the common assumption that reshuffles are simply manifestations of ministerial turnover initiated and controlled by a ‘sovereign’ prime minister, à la Westminster. For both pro-active and re-active reshuffles, the analysis highlights internal variations and offers empirical illustrations from cases around the globe.

In parliamentary systems not all governments survive until the next scheduled elections. Some cabinets are replaced during the legislative term by executives with a different party composition. Others are able to “reborn” as the successor government, undergoing only minimal changes. While the factors leading to government termination through replacement or early elections have been extensively investigated, much less attention has been devoted to analyzing different types of non-electoral cabinet replacement. To fill this gap and assess why certain cabinets manage to return to life almost untouched after their termination, we focus on variation in the transitions from one government to the next in Western Europe. We classify different types of government replacement, from absent or minimal turnover (i.e. a government survives almost untouched) to complete change (a government displaced by a very different set of parties taking office), and use competing-risk survival analysis to estimate the risk of experiencing different types of cabinet replacement. We hypothesize that the factors commonly employed to model cabinet termination can have a different impact on distinct types of cabinet replacements. We expect that those conditions normally associated with longer duration of cabinets will also allow a government to return to life untouched after its termination, for whatever reason the latter may have happened. This is because factors such as majority status, low number of parties or high ideological cohesion render certain governments a particularly viable solution in parliament. We use a comparative dataset on cabinets in 17 Western European countries during the 1999-2020 period.

Regional politics has gained interest for comparative political scientists in general. The processes of regionalisation, decentralisation and/or devolution and its reforms in Western Europe opened the debate on and academic interest for regional politics (Dandoy and Schakel, 2013; De Winter et al., 2006; De Winter, 1998; Keating, 1998). This paper focuses on ministers, portfolio allocation and government formation at regional level (Portugal). The dataset includes information about 195 regional ministers in Azores and Madeira from 1976 to 2020. The argument developed here accounts for the pattern of cabinet formation, the number of ministers and portfolio allocation within a context where longevity in office (Azores) and the absence of political alternation (Madeira) constitute the major features of these regional democracies.

The aim of this contribution, which is part of a larger research project on the determinants of party change, is to shed some light on the weight of cultural factors in shaping the patterns of party organizational change. While mainstream literature has generally overestimated cross-national tendencies, a renewed interest for the study of variance has recently gained ground. To date, however, little attention has been paid to the degree to which domestic cultural variables help to explain such variance. By combining data from the European Values Survey, OECD, UNCTAD, the World Bank, the Party Organization Data Handbook and the Political Party Database Project (PPDB) on seven European countries, from 1990 to 2010, we are interested in verifying how much of the variance in party organizational profiles can be explained by resorting to country-specific cultural characteristics vis-à-vis political factors, supranational drivers as well as socio-economic, demographic and technological features. By contesting on empirical bases the organizational convergence hypothesis, we argue that domestic factors play a significant role in orienting parties' propensity to change as well as the trajectories of changes.

On December 2020, the European Union (EU) approved the Rule of law conditionality mechanism for the disbursement of the NextGenerationEU recovery fund: EU funds are made conditional upon the national government’s implementation of the rule of law and of democratic values. As they became increasingly used to further specific goals, conditionality measures have been raising criticisms and praises. In this paper I explore the conditionality measures that are attached to party funding rules. Indeed, a growing number of countries introduced specific conditions that political parties must respect if they wish to receive funding from the state budget, such as the establishment of intra-party democracy, the parties’ commitment to the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, or gender equality. Based on the analysis of party funding regulations in EU Member States (+ of the European Union itself), I will map the provisions currently in force and assess their effects on the parties and on the policy goals they aim to achieve.

Conventional wisdom argues that party leaders have become increasingly powerful within party organizations, while there has been a growing personalization of party politics. Perhaps surprisingly, the role of party leaders has not been at the centre of party typologies, with a lack of theoretical and empirical specification. Scholarship seems incapable of offering the proper tools to provide further and relevant understanding on this topic, particularly when we consider the growing variety of party types and the ‘hybridization’ of party organizations. This paper intends to provide an analytical framework for the study of party leadership, (re)elaborate the concept of leadership autonomy and derive its operationalization. Finally, this contribution presents and discusses empirical evidence from several parties across Western Europe.

Negli ultimi anni i partiti verdi dell’Europa centro-settentrionale hanno incrementato in maniera costante il loro peso elettorale e politico. Se le europee del 2019 hanno avvalorato ancora una volta l’applicabilità dell’ipotesi delle second order elections [Reif e Schmitt 1980] alle formazioni politiche ecologiste – di vario tipo, dai verdi “classici” agli animalisti – anche le più recenti elezioni legislative nazionali e regionali sembrano confermare la loro crescita, sia pure con percentuali più contenute. Adattando la teoria di Linz [2006] sui partiti latecomers, i guadagni degli ecologisti sembrano essere spesso inversamente proporzionali alle fortune della sinistra tradizionale: a volte dei partiti riformisti (europee 2019, sondaggi Germania 2021), più spesso di quelli radicali. Il loro insediamento in uno spazio politico originariamente occupato da altre forze politiche è stato infatti favorito dall’elaborazione di una proposta politica e organizzativa originale, le cui prime descrizioni risalgono agli studi di Kitschelt [1989 e 1990] e Poguntke [1993], accompagnato dal progressivo declino dell’appeal dei loro competitor, apparentemente meno capaci di adattarsi ad una realtà sociale, demografica ed economica sempre più distante da quella osservata da Lippset e Rokkan [1967] nel loro classico lavoro sui cleavage, il cui “scongelamento” sembra ormai essere giunto ad uno stadio molto avanzato. Tra gli anni ’80 e l’inizio degli anni ’90 i partiti ecologisti si sono diffusi in maniera abbastanza uniforme in quasi tutta l’Europa. Il loro successivo sviluppo è stato però differenziato, con la progressiva crescita di quelli dell’Europa centro-settentrionale e la stagnazione o il declino di quelli dell’Europa meridionale e orientale. L’analisi comparata evidenzia come all’origine di tale divergenza ci sia il percorso evolutivo intrapreso dai partiti ecologisti delle regioni più sviluppate d’Europa – non condiviso o imitato solo in parte dagli altri – che hanno rinunciato alle caratteristiche primigenie di anti-party party [Frankland e Schoonmaker 1992] e ridotto progressivamente la loro distanza politica dai partiti mainstream: sia per quanto riguarda il patrimonio ideologico che per l’organizzazione. Negli anni 2000 alcuni partiti ecologisti hanno infatti iniziato a superare – a livello nazionale o almeno regionale – la loro tradizionale repulsione ideologica nei confronti dei partiti moderati, aderendo liberamente a governi di vario colore politico, anche senza la partecipazione del partito socialdemocratico. Una pratica sempre più diffusa (Austria 2020), che nel mese di settembre potrebbe estendersi alla Germania del dopo-Merkel. Dal punto di vista interno, sono stati eliminati alcuni elementi di radicalità – come l’incompatibilità tra cariche di partito e parlamentari e l’obbligo di rotazione a metà mandato per questi ultimi – combinando però la necessità di dotarsi di una struttura più efficiente con quella di mantenere alcuni elementi del modello originario. La sintesi è stata trovata nella co-leadership bilanciata per genere e nella previsione di alcuni strumenti di democrazia diretta interna, a cominciare dal referendum fra gli iscritti per ratificare le decisioni più importanti proposte dal vertice, come quella di entrare o uscire da una coalizione di governo (Finlandia). Tale percorso di adultizzazione, unito ad altri fattori favorevoli – come l’elevato benessere e la conseguente diffusione di valori post-materialisti [Inglehart 1977] nelle società di riferimento, così come le leggi elettorali proporzionali – sembra oggi aver accreditato nell’Europa centro-settentrionale i partiti verdi come un’alternativa credibile ai partiti popolari e conservatori, di livello superiore a quella offerta dalla left wing e spesso confrontabile con gli stessi partiti socialdemocratici. Se le riforme della governance interna sono state almeno in parte condivise anche dai partiti ecologisti dell’Europa meridionale e orientale, per questi ultimi – dotati di percentuali elettorali e di una membership alquanto ridotte, a volte entrambe irrisorie – la fine della «cattività babilonese» [Poguntke 1999] nei confronti dei partiti egemoni della sinistra, riformista (Francia, Italia) o radicale (Grecia, Portogallo), sembra invece ancora lontana. Riprendendo la classica analisi di Kitschelt [1988] sulle condizioni sociali, economiche e ambientali all’origine dello sviluppo dei partiti ecologisti, il paper si ripromette pertanto di individuare quali sono i fattori che in alcuni contesti li hanno maggiormente aiutati a crescere, fino a sostituirsi ai partiti della left-wing come principale attore di tipo left-libertarian nel proprio sistema partitico – spingendosi a minacciare in alcuni casi la tradizionale egemonia dei partiti socialdemocratici sull’elettorato progressista – e in assenza dei quali tale replacement non è invece (ancora?) avvenuto, come nell’Europa mediterranea e in quella orientale. Come ipotesi di partenza, tali fattori possono essere raggruppati in sette tipologie: 1) fattori esterni di tipo socioeconomico (benessere diffuso, alta diffusione di valori post-materialisti [Inglehart 1977]); 2) fattori esterni di tipo demografico (incidenza delle coorti giovanili e di cittadini nati all’estero) e culturale (distribuzione per titolo di studio); 3) fattori interni di tipo ideologico (programma politico generale/elettorale, disponibilità/indisponibilità ad alleanze con altri partiti e di quale tipo); 4) fattori interni di tipo organizzativo (politiche inclusive di genere e nei confronti dei giovani/giovanissimi; organizzazione sul territorio; disponibilità di risorse finanziarie; mantenimento di caratteristiche organizzative da movement party che coinvolgano nelle decisioni più importanti la membership ed eventualmente anche i simpatizzanti, in caso di primarie aperte); 5) fattori esterni di tipo istituzionale (legge elettorale, politiche migratorie: ius soli/facilità di integrazione dei migranti e delle seconde generazioni); 6) fattori esterni di tipo associativo (resilienza/declino delle organizzazioni sindacali, maggiore/minore sviluppo di associazioni ambientaliste, a sostegno dei migranti e delle persone LGBT, di volontariato in genere); 7) fattori esterni, legati ai competitor/partiti della sinistra tradizionale (eventuali divisioni/crisi interne, possibile screditamento per scandali o lunga partecipazione al governo). Avvalendosi di dati statistici aggregati, della letteratura disponibile e di indagini in corso di realizzazione, il paper cercherà quindi di individuare correlazioni significative per ciascuno dei fattori individuati. Il panel comprenderà sei/otto paesi, rappresentativi di tutte le regioni europee: una prima lista di paesi, tra cui saranno selezionati quelli oggetto di studio, comprende Austria, Belgio, Francia, Finlandia, Germania, Italia, Polonia, Portogallo, Regno Unito, Romania e Svezia. L’analisi sarà condotta su dati relativi al quinquennio 2015-2019, corrispondente all’VIII Legislatura del Parlamento europeo. I risultati della ricerca potranno costituire la base di partenza per successive analisi più approfondite riguardo ad uno o più case study. Il paper potrà essere scritto e presentato in inglese.

The 2021 elections in Germany will represent the end of the Merkel era. The announced unavailability of the four times Chancellor to run for a new electoral term and the consequent inauguration of the post-Merkel political season seems to be the only predictable outcome of the September 2021 elections (Korte 2021). The remaining months before this crucial electoral appointment are marked by an unprecedented level of disillusion regarding the responsiveness of the German political system to internal and external challenges. The Covid-19 crisis has contributed to increased uncertainty amongst German citizens and electors (Infratest Dimap 2021). Feelings of dissatisfaction shared by German citizens on the management of the pandemic go along with uncertainties regarding the electoral results of the September general elections. The “legendary” stability of the German political system (Bolgherini and D’Ottavio 2019), the future role that Germany will play in the international scenario under the new Chancellor, and the predictably new government coalition will be influenced by the 2021 electoral results. Following these premises, the paper will analyze the main dimensions of the electoral uncertain outcome. At the level of the party system main actors, four main issues will be addressed: 1) The crisis of the German Volksparteien (the Christian Democratic Union CDU/CSU and the Social Democratic SPD, currently leading Germany’s Große Koalition); 2) The penetration force of the Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) together with the party’s electors profile; 3) The challenging role of the right wing populist party of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and its internal ideological disputes; 4) The fight for a political role of the Liberal party (FDP) and the radical Left Party (die Linke). In this first part of the paper, data on recent regional elections and survey data will be combined with the consolidated literature on these topics (Decker 2020). The second part of the paper will outline three possible trends useful to frame the September electoral outcomes, when compared to the results of the last general election and of the main regional elections since then: 1) Growing polarization; 2) Persistence of territorial cleavages (East/West); 3) Personalization, combined with the growing role of new sources of digital political communication (Wagner 2019; Träger 2018, Schmidt 2017). These three main dimensions were helpful in detecting the directions of development after the former 2017 general elections. Hence, they will also be adopted to evaluate whether the main trends of the German electoral campaign - at the time of the SISP conference in the second last week before the September 26th election day - suggests the persistence of a certain “continuity in change”, or if innovations will have emerged as a consequence of the new Chancellor candidates, of future new configurations of government coalitions, of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The literature acknowledges a wide array of styles and modes of interactions of emigrants with their home country politics. In direct connection, scholars documented the national political parties’ increased interests in the communities of emigrants entitled to vote and the development of organisational networks abroad. A burgeoning literature has been highlighting the theoretical challenge of the agency of emigrants on classical political participation and party politics theories. In this context, this article studies the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR), a newly created Romanian populist radical right party, its engagement with communities abroad and its success in obtaining strong electoral support in the most recent legislative elections. By fine-tuning the relation between support for AUR in national districts with high emigration rates and migration corridors developed between these districts and the communities abroad that voted for AUR, the analysis draws from an original dataset based on electoral data, exit-polls, and an online survey conducted among non resident Romanian voters in the 2020 legislative elections. From a theoretical perspective, we combine insights from migration studies, electoral behaviour, and the party politics literature. Our main argument is that AUR mobilisation abroad can be explained in terms of both dissatisfaction with mainstream politics at home and voting as an act of expression of a national identity, central elements on the party platform. With C. Tufis (University of Bucharest)

Ballot secrecy is a cornerstone of electoral democracy, since its real or perceived absence can make voters reluctant to express their true preferences. Through survey data from Singapore, we show that doubts over ballot secrecy can alter voting behavior even when the vote is secret and there are no individually-targeted punishments or incentives. We estimate such doubts cause 3-5% of Singaporean voters to support the dominant party despite a preference for the opposition. We also examine individual-level correlates of doubting ballot secrecy: a tendency towards belief in conspiracies and distrust of the mass media are the strongest predictors. Finally, we use counterfactual election results to show the consequences of these doubts: they consistently secure the dominant party additional parliamentary seats, thereby buttressing dominant party rule over the long term without resorting to overtly repressive measures that can attract domestic and international condemnation.

Electoral participation has been on a downward trajectory since at least the late 1970s in advanced democratic Western countries. Over the last ten years or so, however, electoral participation seems to be on an upswing. Considering the time between 1990 and 2015 in a sample of 31 OECD democracies, electoral participation continuously declined in over 60 percent of cases from election to election. By comparison, since 2015 half of the elections in our sample saw an increase in turnout. Interestingly, this development coincides with the rise of far-right and populist actors who claim to “takeback control” from global markets and international elites and re-install a level of national sovereignty that, purportedly, was lost to globalization, integration, and multilateralism (see e.g., Colantone and Stanig, 2018; Dorn, Hanson, Majlesi, et al., 2020; Mudde, 2013). At the same time, green and alternative parties have also gained electoral support several countries (see e.g., Grant and Tilley, 2019). Generally, the uptick in voter participation seems to be accompanied by increasing support for niche, alternative, and radical parties. This paper asks whether it is possible to predict the success of niche parties in general and, more specifically, certain types of niche parties, by considering previous turnout rates and their decline over time. The theoretical rationale behind this idea is straightforward: If decline in turnout is indeed due to a “representation gap” (see Martin, 2019; Schulte-Cloos and Leininger, 2021) and niche party success is contingent on an existing representation gap regarding salient issues (see Meguid, 2005) then we can predict future niche party success with current numbers of voter turnout. Previous literature concerned with niche party success usually analyses how niche party policy positions affect their electoral performance (Adams et al., 2006; Ezrow, 2008) and what strategies mainstream parties can choose when competing with niche parties (Abou-Chadi, 2016; Meguid, 2005; Meijers and Williams,2020; Pardos-Prado, 2015). While most of the studies focus on political competition between mainstream and niche parties in analyzing the latter’s success, only a view studies have analyzed the connection between niche party success and voter turnout. The view existing studies focus on the mobilization effect that radical right-wing populist parties have on abstaining voters (see e.g., Gidron and Hall, 2020; Immerzeel and Pickup,2015; Martin, 2019), also in combination with attitudinal variables (see e.g., Schulte-Cloos and Leininger, 2021) or focus on variables immanent so certain political system that foster or prevent niche party success (see e.g., Bolleyer and Bytzek, 2013; Tavits, 2008; Wardt, Berkhout, and Vermeulen, 2021). Surprisingly, studies dealing with the predictive power of voter turnout in general are still scarce. We address this research gap by arguing that low turnout rates are an indicator of a representation gap that - when reaching a critical mass in a given election - will result in the electoral success of one or more niche parties in the next election. We test this argument in a global sample of 32 established democracies between 1999 and 2019 with a pre-sample period between 1945 and 1998. In detail, we draw on data from the IDEA Voter Turnout database (IDEA, 2021) and ParlGov (Döring and Manow, 2012), and model the likelihood of niche party success at t+1 as a function of turnout shocks in t by running pairwise Prais-Winsten regressions with correlated panels corrected standard errors (Prais and Winsten, 1954). Our empirical findings show that niche party success in a given election is positively correlated with low voter turnout at the previous election. But not only can we show that turnout gaps and subsequent niche party success are correlated in general and across a variety of political systems, we can also estimate the predictive power of turnout shocks. In doing so, we can predict that national turnout shocks at t, i.e., significant turnout gaps between the pre-sample average and the actual turnout, lead to a predicted probability of niche party success in t+1 of nearly 40%, which is three times the predicted probability of a niche party success occurring without a preceding turnout shock.

Contemporary party systems experience perpetual evolutions, through increasing polarisation, higher volatility and lower turnout (Mair 2014), politicisation of new issues and emergence of new cleavages (Kriesi 2016). Moreover, “challenger” parties (De Vries & Hobolt 2020) are said to be eroding the electoral base of mainstream (traditional) party families. Although variously referred to in the literature as niche, protest, challenger, populist, anti-establishment parties (Wagner 2012, Hino 2012, Hobolt & Tilley 2016, Lavezzolo & Ramiro 2018), for the present paper I will term them collectively “non-mainstream parties”. These actors are usually portrayed as loosely organized, often single-issue and ideologically extreme, and their evolution is hardly ever addressed. Conversely, I argue that non-mainstream parties might indeed change over time, with a view to their integration in the system: many of those “challengers” have in fact entered the mainstream of political competition, thanks to ideological moderation and/or organisational reforms (Zaslove 2012, contra Akkerman & Rooduijn 2015). With the proposed paper, I am at analysing the extent to which non-mainstream parties moderate themselves ideologically to gain legitimacy and reach systemic integration. A diachronic perspective will elucidate patterns of ideological change, as well as potential differences among non-mainstream parties, which I suggest are influenced by their internal organisation. The proposed paper will thus explore the ideological changes undertaken by non-mainstream parties to become integrated in the system. More specifically, it shall address two research questions: (RQ1) How does party organization influence programmatic changes of non-mainstream parties? (RQ2) Are those changes beneficial or detrimental for non-mainstream parties? Party integration entails obtaining legitimation by other actors, such as the inclusion in “cooperative interactions at the party system level” (Zulianello 2019: 24). Scholarship still largely overlooks the fact that some of these “challengers” have reached parliamentary representation or even governmental office, therefore becoming de facto insiders (especially the populist radical right, cf. Akkerman et al. 2016). Has this institutionalisation required some adaptation in the party’s ideological profile? I deem extremely important to track the evolution (if any) experienced by non-mainstream parties – usually studied in a more static perspective – systematically examining differences among them. In detail, I will observe as dependent variable the shifts in the positioning and issue salience of these parties. As concerns positioning, I shall determine whether and under what conditions non-mainstream parties are more likely to moderate (thus presenting themselves as viable coalition partners, as argued for niche parties by Tromborg 2015 and Pereira 2020) or to maintain a distinctive stance on their core issues (as hypothesised by Adams et al. 2006, Adams & Somer-Topcu 2009, Ezrow et al. 2011, Han 2017). Literature has addressed the relation between ostracism and party radicalisation, suggesting that non-ostracised parties tend to moderate their position over time (cf. van Spanje & Van der Brug 2007, van Spanje & de Graaf 2018; contra Akkerman & Rooduijn 2015). However, the direction of causality might also be the opposite, i.e. ideologically extreme parties are more likely to be ostracised. If so, challenger parties would have further incentives to moderate and move closer to the median voter: spatial theories of competition predict that elections are won at the centre and ideological moderation appears to be positively associated with perceptions of competence (Johns and Kölln 2020). However, several contributions found that niche parties are electorally penalised when they moderate (cf. Adams et al. 2006, Ezrow 2008, Abou-Chadi & Orlowski 2016, Maeda 2016; contra Tromborg 2015). Do these findings hold for other non-mainstream party types? Regarding issue salience, it has been suggested (cf. Zons 2016) that a narrow issue appeal is beneficial for new parties, to concentrate their resources more easily and successfully on a small range of issues. Over time, however, such limited ideological appeal might vary and these actors might want to expand the range of issues addressed. Indeed, recent literature has found evidence that, under certain conditions, challengers increase their vote share when competing on economic issues (Bergman & Flatt 2020, Spoon & Williams 2020). Indeed, this suggests that non-mainstream parties are not purely policy-driven but can choose strategic behaviour, instead of relying exclusively on issue ownership. For the scope of the proposed paper, I shall privilege the analysis of internal rather than external shocks: albeit party change can be encouraged by critical junctures such as parliamentary breakthrough or government participation (as suggested by Harmel & Janda 1994), the internal structure and balance of power within the party itself also play a major role. In this respect, I argue that party organisation (the main independent variable) could explain differences in the strategy of non-mainstream parties. Among them, for instance, niche parties are usually presented as activist-led and therefore more keen to maintain the favour of their core supporters than to follow shifts in the median voter (Ezrow et al. 2011). Nonetheless, other non- mainstream parties could pursue different aims, connected to their internal organisation. For instance, populist parties would behave quite differently: they address the broadest electorate possible, taking positions closer to the median voter to maximise their votes. They also greatly emphasise the role of the leader, while participation of individual members is hardly ever structured (Weyland 2001). Assuming that party activists are more policy-motivated (cf. Kitschelt 1988) and therefore less flexible to ideological compromise, I argue that more organisational constraints on the leader can decrease programmatic change (Sánchez-Cuenca 2004, Pedersen 2011). I therefore expect that (H1) parties dominated by activists change less than parties with strongly centralised leaderships. I aim to show that non-mainstream parties can evolve to integrate in the system but that they might do so in different ways depending on their internal structure. Therefore, distinguishing non-mainstream parties based on their intra-party structure could help refine distinctions between non-mainstream actors and suggest new classifications thereof. The main hypothesis will be tested by means of cross-national data from the Political Party Database (PPDB) project and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES). I will estimate regression models in order to test the effect of party organisation on programmatic change of non-mainstream parties. The final part of the paper shall then be devoted to an in-depth discussion of two or three cases, in order to assess the effect of programmatic changes by non-mainstream parties on their performance. Accordingly, ideological change (i.e. moderation or issue expansion) will in turn become the independent variable, influencing non-mainstream parties’ electoral performance and government participation. To sum up, I would expect that non-mainstream actors do initiate some changes to gain legitimation within the political system, and that they might especially do so when they are faced with the possibility of participating in a governmental coalition. At the same time, party organisation might engender some path-dependence, with parties presenting more inclusive decision-making procedures resulting less ideologically flexible, due to the increased number of potential veto points and the higher weight of (supposedly more policy-coherent) party activists. Finally, the effect of such ideological changes on party performance might be negative for niche parties (as shown by previous literature) but not necessarily for other non-mainstream actors (for instance, it could help radical right parties to become established competitors). The paper would start from a more descriptive account of non-mainstream parties’ characteristics, to then explain effects of party organization through regression models with cross-national data, and finally describe a smaller amount cases in sufficient depth to elucidate how non-mainstream party performance is affected by strategic changes.

The demand for the introduction of new tools of direct democracy in Europe has arguably never been more pressing. Although national referenda in the last two decades have been crucial in upsetting the European Union and in some countries are considered a highly contested issue, the literature on which actors politicise the most this issue is surprisingly scarce. We will try to fill this gap, distinguishing theoretically between two different drivers of this politicisation. On the one hand, populist parties embody a monist demand for more direct democracy. On the other hand, post-materialist progressive parties should advocate a pluralist of direct democracy. Using the data of the Comparative Manifesto Project, we will test our hypothesis in several national elections across Europe in the last decade.

In recent years, scholars have devoted considerable effort to analysing the institutionalisation of challenger parties, referring mainly to the national level. In contrast, the aim of the paper is to analyse the patterns of institutionalisation of the Movimento 5 Stelle at the local level, exploring the different paths undertaken by the same actor in two different contexts. Our aim is to understand the dissimilar evolution of this political movement through the analysis of contextual differences considering the cases of Turin and Rome, the two most important cities that have been governed by the M5S so far. In order to do so, the political history of these cities will be analysed, with a special focus on the previous administration and taking into account the genesis and evolution of the M5S in the two selected cases. In particular we will show how, once in government, the two local parties dealt in different ways with some common issues: the relationship with social and environmental movements, the judiciary problems of the two mayors, and the Olympic Games.

Brothers of Italy (FdI) is a splinter party formed in 2011 and since then it has constantly increased its electoral support. The party is a radical right actor, self-defining itself as sovereigntist. Contrary to other challenger parties, FdI advocates its place on the right of the political spectrum, also emphasizing its continuity with the political and cultural tradition of the Italian post-fascist Right. In this respect, the interaction between such ideological continuity and the FdI’s new sovereigntist identity makes this party an ideal case to ascertain whether it can consider a new or an old party. We disentangle the FdI’s newness employing the framework proposed by Barnea and Rahat (2011). In this respect, we compare the distinct profile of FdI in the 2013 and 2018 elections with its predecessor parties (People of Freedom in 2008 and National Alliance in 2006). The analysis looks precisely at the continuity on FdI’s issues and ideological configuration (Party-in-the-electorate), on its internal changes (Party-as-organization), and on the continuity of its political personnel in appointing candidates for the general elections (party-in-offices). In order to show the degree of FdI’s newness, we employ the party’s sources (manifestos and statues) and survey data (ITANES).

Political parties in Western democracies are experimenting innovative tools and processes for facing both the crisis of legitimacy in the electorate and of partisans’ and supporters’ participation. Among them, various challenger and traditional parties have chosen to implement digital Intra-Party Democracy (IPD) processes. Considering the growing use of digital technologies by parties, the literature tends to consider these parties’ innovations as linear processes of development, highlighting their positive or negative implications in terms of uses and impacts. Whether proper attention is paid to digital innovation as it arises or expands, there is a lack of analysis in the cases when parties downplay or eliminate certain IPD’s digital procedures. As we will see, innovation could also take setbacks, in term of both de-digitalisation and de-innovation. What does innovation setbacks in digital IPD imply? What are the key factors for understanding innovation setbacks? To what extend de-innovation and de-digitalisation are strategic and political choices or are, rather, a consequence of the innovation process? Our paper aims to provide answer to these questions by analysing the Spanish party Podemos, a new, challenger and digital party that has experimented different innovation setbacks in its digital IPD processes and tools. With this purpose, we will examine certain digital and innovative party’s processes that have been replaced, downplayed, partially diverted, changed or suspended. This single case study will lead the authors to present some exploratory considerations and to propose a typology of innovation setbacks in political parties.

Current Turkish politics presents a couple of newly emerged right and left-wing political parties for the last five years. New political parties are conceivably open to be consistent actors of the politics if they depend on the new socio-political cleavages, according to Lipset & Rokkan’s seminal study. In terms of their institutional lack of experience and the transformations through Turkish politics and regime, these parties seem unlucky for the competence with institutionalized parties. On the other hand, their current politics of conjunctures generate some elbow room and create time and chance for their expectation for institutionalization. In this paper presentation, it is briefly discussed the external aspects of posing newly founded political parties of Turkish politics for investigating their capability of mobilization on socio-political cleavages and voter base. Yet, they have enjoyed their elbow rooms through Turkish presidential regime and its electoral system. For the near future, there seems to experience a sort of limit or collision for them in terms of their elbow rooms and non-institutionalized structures. And for the institutionalization through the political regime, these parties need to cover some socio-political cleavages robustly. This study explores its focus on three right and three left-wing and newly emerged political parties of Turkey.

La Russia post-sovietica è frequentemente descritta come un regime patrimoniale in cui la centralizzazione verticistica del potere politico nella leadership presidenziale si appoggia ad una classe di oligarchi che tiene le redini di un’economia strutturata secondo grandi conglomerati industriali. Lungi dall’essere rigidamente separati, i due ambiti sono intrecciati istituzionalmente attraverso i canali di reclutamento delle élite politiche. Figure aziendali di rilievo sono infatti assiduamente cooptate in posizioni chiave dell’esecutivo, come pure elette negli organi rappresentativi, sia a livello federale che regionale. Tale sovrapposizione assume particolare rilevanza nel caso dell’industria del petrolio e del gas, che negli ultimi decenni è diventata il settore trainante dell’economia al punto da rifondere lo status geopolitico del Paese nell’immagine di una superpotenza energetica sui mercati globali. Oltre alla ridefinizione dell’immaginario nazionale sul piano discorsivo, gli idrocarburi alimentano anche le strategie di sopravvivenza e la legittimità delle stesse élite. Il paper proposto mette a fuoco il nazionalismo energetico russo attraverso la lente delle università specializzate in materia di petrolio e gas. Queste sono intese come una comunità epistemica che attraverso la diffusione di conoscenze tecniche e la condivisione di una identità di gruppo è capace di esercitare influenza sui decisori politici. Se raffiguriamo il sistema decisionale russo con l’immagine di cerchi concentrici che si irradiano dal Cremlino, quello delle élite accademiche è invero un cerchio periferico e non immediatamente politico. Non a caso non sono presenti in letteratura riferimenti sul ruolo politico dagli accademici russi. Ciò nonostante, la prospettiva delle élite accademiche apre uno spaccato sulle intersezioni tra potere ed energia. Inoltre, porta ad emersione contraddizioni e limiti del discorso nazionalista non rintracciabili nella versione ufficiale. Le università tecnico-industriali che formano i professionisti nel settore degli idrocarburi intrattengono legami diretti con le principali compagnie petrolifere e del gas quali Gazprom, Rosneft e Lukoil. La stretta cooperazione tra università specializzate ed operatori del settore è testimoniata da progetti di ricerca congiunti, programmi di formazione mirata e di aggiornamento professionale, flussi di finanziamenti e dalla prassi delle porte girevoli nello sviluppo delle carriere. Data l’integrazione delle compagnie petrolifere e del gas nella strategia energetica fissata a livello governativo, la sinergia tra accademia e comparto industriale dell’energia offre perciò inedite opportunità di analisi sulla governance del settore. La scelta è motivata anche da ragioni di fattibilità. Il contesto universitario è infatti contraddistinto da un minor grado di chiusura rispetto al settore energetico, la cui generale opacità preclude la possibilità di condurre ricerca empirica. Il paper si basa su un questionario somministrato a 114 professori e ricercatori di università selezionate, quali l’Università statale del petrolio e del gas “Gubkin”, l’Università mineraria di San Pietroburgo, l’Università industriale di Tyumen e l’Università statale di Novosibirsk. L’analisi quantitativa è completata e estesa da interviste qualitative in profondità.

Gli eredi di Enea. Le élite contemporanee tra ricchezza e potere Ottorino Cappelli e Francesco Maria Villani “Tra i discendenti di Enea, che regnarono in Alba, la successione passò a due fratelli, Amulio e Numitore. Amulio propose di dividere tutta l’eredità in due quote, mettendo in una il regno, nell’altra le ricchezze e l’oro portato da Troia. Numitore scelse il regno. Ma Amulio, avendo le ricchezze e acquistando per mezzo di queste maggiore potenza di Numitore, gli sottrasse il regno.” Plutarco, Vite, III, 2,3. Non meraviglia che in un’era di populismo ritorni in auge il tema delle élite. Privo tuttavia della saggezza degli antichi, il discorso populista si limita a contemplare l’eterno contrasto tra élite e popolo e trascura il vero tema politico: il rapporto di potere tra le élite. Così i suoi diversi filoni puntano il dito in direzioni diverse: quello conservatore avversa soprattutto le élite politiche e burocratiche, il filone sociale denuncia in particolare le élite economiche e tecnocratiche. Confusamente, poi, tutte le élite sono presentate come “corrotte”: le prime perché si arricchiscono abusando del proprio potere, le seconde perché comprano il potere con il loro denaro. Nella notte populista tutte le vacche si assomigliano. La domanda che qui ci poniamo è: ora che il tema delle élite torna alla ribalta dopo decenni di declino, è possibile affrontarlo sfuggendo alla disputa novecentesca sulle “promesse” (per alcuni irrealistiche, per altri tradite) del governo del popolo? E leggerlo invece, seguendo il realismo di Plutarco, dal punto di vista del rapporto tra ricchezza e regno, distinguendo e misurando in chiave comparata le diverse configurazioni di potere che emergono dalla multiforme relazione tra le élite politiche ed economiche? Nel cercare risposta a queste domande, partiamo da un tema caro ai populismi di tutti i tempi, quello della corruzione politica, piegandolo tuttavia alle nostre esigenze analitiche. 1. Nella sua definizione comune la corruzione indica “un comportamento del pubblico ufficiale che devia dalle norme accettate allo scopo di perseguire fini privati". È evidente qui un pregiudizio anti-politico, laddove il pubblico ufficiale è visto come l’attore protagonista di quel comportamento deviante. In realtà il concetto giuridico di corruzione configura un rapporto di scambio tra due attori coinvolti in un’operazione di “compravendita di statualità”: un attore pubblico compie od omette un atto, illecito o dovuto, in cambio di denaro o altra utilità offerta da un attore privato. Inoltre la direzione della relazione varia sostanzialmente a seconda che l’attore pubblico induca o costringa al pagamento illecito (concussione), ovvero che sia l’attore privato a indurre la condotta deviante mediante “dazione o promessa” di denaro o altri vantaggi materiali (corruzione in senso proprio). Infine, ma non da ultimo, va considerato l’effetto complessivo di questa relazione sul sistema politico. Samuel Huntington esprimeva così l’aspetto sistemico del problema: “Corruption is, of course, one measure of the absence of effective political institutionalization. Public officials lack autonomy and coherence, and subordinate their institutional roles to exogenous demands.” In questa mancanza di autonomia e in quel subordinarsi a domande esogene abbiamo la posizione individuale del pubblico ufficiale, mentre nel loro effetto sistemico, la mancata istituzionalizzazione, è racchiuso il significato della corruzione come misura politica: una modalità di rapporto tra ricchezza e potere in cui lo Stato - il pubblico - si rivela la parte debole della relazione. Questo tipo di relazione è al centro del concetto di “state capture” (o grand corruption) che indica uno scambio corruttivo in cui gli interessi privati mirano a influenzare il processo di rule making. Diversamente dalla semplice corruzione (petty corruption), che riguarda l’apparato amministrativo e tende a distorcere l’applicazione di leggi esistenti, attraverso la grand corruption, “le imprese riescono a codificare i propri privilegi all’interno della struttura giuridica e regolativa dell’economia … a modellare gli ambienti politici, regolatori e giuridici a proprio vantaggio generando una impressionante concentrazione di rendite a spese del resto dell’economia”. La compravendita di statualità avviene dunque ai livelli alti in cui le élite economiche mirano a catturare la classe politica nella sua funzione più propria, quella decisionale. 3. Per operazionalizzare il concetto di grand corruption, ricorreremo al dataset curato dall’istituto Varieties of Democracy dell’Università di Gothenburg, uno dei migliori progetti recentemente lanciati nell’ambito di studi che si occupa di costruire indici quali-quantitativi. V-Dem offre tre indicatori utili al nostro scopo. I primi due, che aggregheremo in un indice di corruzione delle élite politiche, riguardano uno l’esecutivo e l’altro il legislativo. Le domande poste agli expert coders sono: “How routinely do members of the executive (the head of state, the head of government, and cabinet ministers), or their agents, grant favors in exchange for bribes, kickbacks, or other material inducements?” e “Do members of the legislature abuse their position for financial gain?”. Il terzo indicatore è codificato come Power distributed by socio-economic position e intende misurare “the extent to which wealth and income translates into political power.” La domanda a cui risponde è: “Is political power distributed according to socioeconomic position?” Le diverse opzioni fornite ai coders hanno come soggetto “i ricchi” (wealthy people) e variano a seconda che questi godano di A virtual monopoly, A dominant hold, A very strong hold on political power, ecc. Si tratta a tutti gli effetti di un indicatore del potere politico della ricchezza, o plutocrazia. In base a questi indicatori si può ipotizzare che la cattura dello stato da parte delle élite economiche sia tanto più efficace quanto più un alto indice di corruzione delle élite politiche si associa a un alto valore dell’indicatore di ‘plutocrazia’. Diversamente, un più basso livello di plutocrazia segnalerà una situazione in cui le élite politiche, pur molto corrotte, sono comunque in grado di sfruttare le loro rendite di posizione senza cedere potere alle élite economiche, mantenendole anzi in una posizione di dipendenza politica. Nello spazio che si estende tra i casi estremi, ci attendiamo di leggere le diverse configurazioni di potere disegnate dalle relazioni tra le elite. L'elaborazione che presenteremo consiste in un diagramma a dispersione basato su un campione di 40 paesi rilevati nel 2020 e risultate dall’incrocio tra l'indice aggregato di corruzione delle élite politiche (membri dell’esecutivo e del legislativo) e l’indicatore di plutocrazia (potere politico delle élite economiche). Di seguito, in breve, il quadro che proporremo. 4. Lo spazio risulterà diviso in quattro quadranti. 1) I livelli più bass di corruzione politica e plutocrazia si trovano in Occidente, mentre il resto del mondo appare navigare nel mare aperto del “governo privato”. Questo suggerisce la presenza di un bias in questo tipo di misurazioni, perché focalizzandosi sui casi estremi dello scambio di tangenti e dell’accesso diretto al potere da parte dei “ricchi”, non considerano forme indirette di influenza più difficili da misurare, ma non meno efficaci e molto diffuse in Occidente. Si noterà tuttavia che le nostre misure riescono comunque a dar conto di alcune variazioni significative in questa parte del mondo: all’estrema integrità dei paesi scandinavi fanno da pendant lo sbilanciamento degli USA verso la plutocrazia e di Italia e Grecia verso la corruzione. 2) A livelli relativamente contenuti di corruzione, ma alti di plutocrazia, troviamo le monarchie dell’area MENA: EAU, Oman, Arabia Saudita, con il Marocco nella posizione più rappresentativa. Come illustreremo attraverso il caso del Marocco, in questi paesi i problemi più gravi di corruzione riguardano l’apparato amministrativo più che il vertice politico. L’occupazione patrimoniale del potere centrale da parte della ricchissima famiglia reale e del suo entourage rede sostanzialmente residuale il fenomeno della corruzione. 3) A livelli alti di corruzione politica, ma relativamente bassi di plutocrazia, troviamo diversi paesi soprattutto latino-americani, ex sovietici e dell’Europa orientale, tra cui spiccano i casi di Ungheria e Venezuela. Le élite politiche appaiono qui tendenzialmente dominanti sui “nuovi ricchi” che risultano fortemente dipendenti dal potere politico. Le prime hanno saldamente in mano il potere statale; i secondi pagano per entrare nel circolo dei favoriti, ma rimangono in una posizione politicamente subordinata. Illustreremo questa configurazione di potere con riferimento al caso dell’Ungheria. 4) Infine, la maggior parte dei paesi del nostro campione si affolla nel quadrante che vede livelli superiori alla media in entrambe le dimensioni. Si noterà tuttavia che al vertice estremo, dove i massimi livelli di plutocrazia si incrociano con la massima corruzione politica, si collocano paesi piccoli per numero di abitanti e peso politico come Cambogia, N. Korea, Haiti, Azerbaijan. Qui le élite politiche ed economiche sono praticamente indistinguibili, come legate da un rapporto di simbiosi. I paesi più grandi e potenti seguono invece a notevole distanza. Segnatamente in Iran, Russia, Egitto, Turchia e Cina il valore dell’indice di corruzione politica supera quello dell’indicatore di plutocrazia. In questi paesi sembra in formazione una complessa “élite del potere” in cui le élite economiche hanno con le élite politiche una relazione di natura osmotica più che simbiotica. Il nesso tra potere e ricchezza appare caratterizzato da un misto di collisione e collusione che merita di essere esplorato a fondo. Cercheremo di dar conto di questa condizione

All’indomani della caduta dell’Unione Sovietica, il complesso processo di ricostruzione della Federazione Russa come Stato indipendente è stato analizzato sia nella letteratura storica che politologica. A distanza di trent’anni da quegli eventi, invece, meno indagate risultano la politica estera russa degli anni Novanta e, in particolare, il tentativo che fu compiuto per l’integrazione della Russia nel nuovo ordine internazionale a guida americana. Il presente contributo, quindi, concentra l’attenzione sulla debolezza strutturale della leadership di Boris Eltsin e dei governi a lui legati, riconducendo a questi ultimi il fallimento dell’obiettivo dell’integrazione nell’ordine liberale così come era stato immaginato dall’élite occidentalizzatrice russa. La riflessione sarà quindi incentrata sull’analisi comparata tra il periodo 1992-1996, caratterizzato dai primi embrionali tentativi di integrazione della Russia nell’ordine liberale, e il periodo 1996-2000 segnato invece dal progressivo allontanamento della Federazione Russa dagli Stati Uniti e dal Sistema internazionale da essi edificato all’indomani della fine della Guerra Fredda.

1) Come sono variate le élites del socialismo democratico in quattro grandi snodi: - La fase d’impianto e definizione ideologico-organizzativa (prevalenza di intellettuali non necessariamente della classe operaia e perlopiù cresciuti culturalmente all'interno delle riviste/scuole di partito). Si tratta soprattutto di "party ideologists" (S. L. Mudge, Leftism reinvented) che sviluppano la propria cultura politica sulla conoscenza ed interpretazione di Marx-Engels (Bernstein, Kautsky) - Una fase appena posteriore ma sempre della fase di impianto, in gran parte coincidente con la prima, in cui avanzano soggetti della classe operaia/proletaria: Nenni, Stauning, Hedtoft, Hansson, Gerhardsen ed altri. In seguito Brandt in Germania, per quanto più giovane. - La fase di governo/egemonica, dovuta anche e soprattutto al mutamento di cultura politica, anche nel reclutamento: fra anni 30 e anni 50 giungono al vertice nuovi esperti di partito che, pur se socialisti, sono ispirati dalle nuove teorie economiche anti-laissez faire. Costoro provengono dal mondo universitario. Il successo della fase di impianto (suffragio universale, garanzie costituzionali al partito di massa della classe) li spinge a proporre le nuove teorie economiche ai partiti di massa del socialismo e ai dirigenti di estrazione proletaria. Si tratta di Kampmann e Krag (DK), i coniugi Myrdal, Wigforss e Erlander (S). - La fase successiva è la svolta neoliberale (dagli anni 1980): i partiti di massa della classe anziché far crescere le classi dirigenti decisive in casa propria in sostanza accolgono classi dirigenti e metodi elaborati altrove: marketing politico, comunicazione e soprattutto dottrine economiche apprese nei centri di affari e di studio finanziari. - I partiti sempre meno soggetto radicato di rappresentanza e sempre più veicolo. Ovvero: il partito da CLASSISTA (prima fase) diviene Della CLASSE, ma non di CLASSE (e però nemmeno interclassista: SECONDA FASE). Nella terza diviene CARTEL PARTY. 2) Descrizione del problema delle élites attuali in Scandinavia: alcune critiche che, nel dibattito e negli studi, si rivolgono alla classi dirigenti socialdemocratiche nel mondo scandinavo: cultura politica (ordoliberale?), reclutamento decrescente fra le classi popolari, maggiore personalismo, rivalità non riconducibili a opzioni politiche palesi ecc. - Eventuali segni di ravvedimento.

Based on data from the five waves of Arab Barometer surveys (2007 - 2018), this contribution aims to map the main notions of security (physical, economic, political, etc.) that emerge among Arab citizens and their respective levels of analysis (personal, community, national). Specifically, it identifies how perceptions of key challenges have evolved over time in different Arab countries, as well as the main subjective sources of concern and threat. Starting from this empirical investigation, the paper aims to reflect on the still prevailing concepts of security and insecurity, their limits and implications, as well as to stimulate debate on how different perceptions of security can affect political behavior and action.

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) is often described as an oasis of stability in the center of a tumultuous Middle East. Nevertheless, numerous challenges during the last decade threaten to overstretch the already weak and not yet fully consolidated structures of the self-governing administration. Some of these crises were constantly reemerging over the past decade: the repetitive games of cat-and-mouse between the Kurdish regional and the Iraqi federal governments regarding access to the annual state budget or the periodic outbursts of violence caused by different terrorist groups, to name just a few examples. While the threats to the security of the KRI used to be over long periods of time state-centric and military-focused, now, growing pressure accumulates also from within. Over the last decade continuous discontent and social unrest have been simmering and bursting into repeated episodes of violent protests especially from young people. The youth bulge of the KRI experiences a growing feeling of neglect of their social and economic grievances by the political elite and is confronted with other types of insecurities than their parents and grandparents, who mostly felt or fled from direct violence. Based on field work conducted in March and April 2019 at the Universities of Halabja and Sulaymanyia in the KRI, this paper explores what kind of insecurities young, educated people in the KRI are confronted with and how they deal with them. First results show a strong disenchantment of the over 300 surveyed students with the political elite of the region. One of the recurrent expressed insecurities is the fear of not receiving a job after graduation. Over 90% of the survey participants connect their discouraging job prospects with corruption, their own political affiliation divergent from the governing parties, as well as the overburdening of the public sector.

By analysing the extent to which the expertise developed within transnational human rights networks plays a major role in shaping the content of advocacy at the local level (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Goodale and Merry 2007; Pommerolle and Siméant 2008), we will study the ways in which Moroccan human rights campaigns such as the one on the abolition of the death penalty as well as reform initiatives on topics related to security governance, are shaped according to the normative frameworks mobilised by local experts working in partnership with transnational actors. Assuming that the transnational circulation of normative references has an impact on norm-creation and norm-interpretation processes at the national level (Dezalay and Garth 2002 ; Delpeuch 2006, 2008) and as far as the field of security governance reforms is concerned, a “symbolic import-export” (Dezalay, 2004) dynamic seems to be at play. In this context, democracy governance-related transnational “best practices” are promoted at the local level by NGOs advocating for legislative and policy reforms. Grounded in international political sociology and discourse analysis, our empirical study will allow us to capture the overlapping local and international normative references as well as the politicization and depoliticization dynamics at play within NGOs’ advocacy work (Catusse & Vairel, 2010; Gaudin et al., 2019). The paper will show the results of a first exploratory ethnographic fieldwork carried out in March 2020 in Rabat. It will be based on the analysis of NGOs’ archives, on a series of interviews with key-actors in the field, as well as on ethnographic observations of advocacy networks’ meetings.

Over the past fifteen years, academic debate over violent non-state actors (vnsa) evolved, following events in Libya, Yemen, Syria as well as in the crises born after the revolutionary changes of ten years ago. The presence of foreign violent non-state actors in war-torn countries usually means further desegregation for societies, social and economic problems for states and increased volatility of peace processes. Apart from the concrete problem, scholars and legal institutions often debate over the concept of violent non-state actors, the level of the obligations to which these latter are bound, and how to manage their presence. The Libyan civil war, in itself, offers many examples of local violent non-state actors, but also of violent non-state actors from neighbor countries, who came also from South from Sudan and Chad. Kin ties, working relations, tribal connections and a long history link Chadian citizens from the former region of Borkou-Ennedi-Tibetsi with Libya’s Southern part. Chadian rebel groups lament the lack of democracy, and the neopatrimonialism in Chadian society, that would not leave them other option other than armed struggle. Did the international community perceive these contradictions in their full extension after the beginning of Libyan Civil war? Did Libyan institutions always perceive these groups as a threat during last five years? In the aftermath of the Northern Chad offensive of 2021, while Libyan peace process is still underway, there is an understandable attention over Chadian rebels in Libya. There is some likelihood of an evolution towards a new praxis over Chadian rebels in the area? To understand the evolution occurred to the legal concept of vnsa and trying to answer this question, this paper will discuss these points: (1) How have they been conceptualized from a legal point of view Chadian rebels in Libya in the last decade? Were they compared to other violent non-state actors? (2) How did international institutions answer to this specific threat (if they did it)? More precisely: can we talk about a coordinated strategy against Chadian violent non-state actors who acted in Libya, coming from the UN or in the AU – or rather were they seen as a problem that the concerned countries had to face out of the sphere of their foreign policy? From these points, I will take some final considerations on the concept of “violent non-state actors” as such.

Since the 2000s, the prevention of acts of terrorism has been the main security agenda in most Western countries. Several scholars, so far, examined Western Counter Violent Extremism (CVE) and Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) policies, based on the concept of ‘radicalisation’. The role of education within PVE policies has been, so far, one of the most debated topics in security studies. More specifically, the debate on education and prevention focused on the role of educators in recognising potential signs of radicalisation in their students, and on the role of PVE policies in increasing marginalisation among religious, ethnic and social minorities. While the debate on Western PVE policies focusing on education flourished in the last decade, non-Western CVE policies and especially the role played by educators and education institution in non-Western countries have been analysed to a lesser extent. In this paper, I focus on Tunisia as a case study, in order to examine the role played by religion and religious education in PVE in a non-Western and Muslim majority country. Through qualitative interviews, I will analyse the role played by religious education in Tunisian CVE policies, examining the role of two local associations working with imams and training them to prevent and address processes of radicalisation. The goal of this research is to observe whether and how national and international discourses on security influenced the creation of PVE policies focusing on religious education on the local level, whether and how the mainstream narrative present in Tunisia focusing on the distinction between a moderate and a radical approach to Islam influenced the creation and/or evolution of PVE and CVE policies in the country, and lastly whether PVE policies focusing on religious education led to the exclusion or differential inclusion of imams or people supposedly at risk in the country, due to political, social or regional differences.

North African borderlands are portrayed and heavily securitized as spaces of instability, transnational organised crime and terrorism. These representations often lack knowledge of local dynamics and neglect the perspective of peripheral communities and the informal networks they draw on for everyday security delivery. In many parts of North Africa, state institutions do not hold authority exclusively but rather share it with non-state security actors who possess relative public authority and legitimacy. Given the recent academic interest in hybrid forms of security governance comprising state and non-state structures, this paper investigates local security arrangements and their impact on perceptions and practices of peripheral communities living in the highly marginalized Tunisian border regions of Kasserine and El Kef, along the border with Algeria. The co-optation of informal structures by central governments has historically been a constituent element of administering the country’s economically marginalized and politically neglected borderlands. Following the 2010 - 2011 uprisings, major political transformations amplified by spill-over effects from the Libyan crisis have led to a reconfiguration of local power structures at the border through the appearance of domestic terrorist groups, resulting in new forms of insecurities nearby communities face. Drawing upon document-based research and in-depth interviews, this paper offers an exploration of border inhabitants’ experiences and perceptions of how local security provision adapts to this changing security environment. Going beyond an assessment of local key actors and their links to formal state structures, this paper attempts to unravel how border communities perceive and shape state and non-state governance practices and legitimation strategies by looking at everyday forms of security narrative and practice. The findings presented in this paper suggest the centrality of community practices and non-formal institutions as integral components of on-the-ground governance arrangements. In conclusion, they demonstrate that greater attention should be paid to the embeddedness of hybrid structures within specific community settings as vital determinant for the outcome of governance efforts in peripheral border regions.

Among the conceptual “cracks” of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda there is the widely shared assumption about the “Global North as the conceptual, material and institutional home” of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (Basu, 2016). This has marginalized the Global South in the WPS discourse and practice as well as resulted in a lack of knowledge about the aim and the scope of UNSCR 1325 and the subsequent Resolutions in several countries of this area. Looking at North Africa, many countries consider themselves not directly concerned by the WPS Agenda, “an Agenda that applies only to countries in conflict or post-conflict”. If in Morocco – that has not adopted a National Action Plan (NAP) yet, many are unaware of the WPS Agenda or have a misconception of it, in Tunisia, there are still several ignoring that the country adopted a NAP in 2018. This article focuses on Tunisia, by investigating how the WPS Agenda has been publicly discussed, promoted and adapted in the country following the 2011 uprising. Although Tunisia ratified UNSCR 1325 in 2006, the government has indeed included the adoption of a NAP in its agenda only in 2011, driven by the Arab revolts and the large number of refugee women from Libya. The process started from the grassroots, thanks in particular to some CSOs as “Free Sight”, but it was then led by the top-down, specifically by the Tunisian Ministry of Women, Children and the Family, with some attempt to include CSOs. Although largely considered a good framework document, the NAP adopted in 2018 has encountered several problems in its implementation so far, for a number of reasons including the lack of a specific budget allocation, the numerous changes of government from February 2020, and the explosion of the Covid-19 pandemic in March of the same year. Moreover, Tunisian women’s associations, which are extremely active on the front of reforms to the Personal Status Code and on that of transitional justice, do not seem equally “attracted” by the WPS dossier. As a matter of fact, the WPS Agenda has so far aroused little interest among civil society actors in North Africa countries, and especially in those experiencing the 2011 revolutions. Through text analysis and ethnographic methodologies (semi-structured interviews conducted in Tunisia with different stakeholders – national institutions; CSOs; women activists and IOs – between April and September 2020), this paper investigates WPS implementation in Tunisia. In particular, it looks at a) the main achievements and challenges in terms of the 2018 NAP’s implementation; b) whether the NAP is reframing the concept of security in Tunisia, incorporating the “human security” dimension; b) how the NAP is representative and inclusive of local women’s needs, perspectives and expectations. Indeed, the pathways that women have taken to gain power and resist oppression in Tunisia, especially after the 2011 revolution, have proven to be very diverse in terms of the actors involved, their objectives, and the strategies adopted. In this regard, the evolution of the WPS Agenda has certainly played a role in shaping women’s participation, but how the Agenda has been used to motivate and inform the strategies of female leaders, women’s groups and women-led movements for change remains far from clear.

How is the notion of security framed in a fragile democracy and an authoritarian setting characterized by a high societal and political conflict? Drawing on the Tunisian and the Algerian cases, this paper shows how, over the past years, the democratization process in Tunisia and the revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary) momentum in Algeria have been respectively influenced by a politicized construction of the 'threat', which in turn contributed to fuel the political conflict as well as the raise of radical alternatives. Building on the ‘securitization’ theory, this study aims at unveiling the enemy's framing process in highly conflictual scenarios shaped by strong identitarian issues, complex relational dynamics, and strategic interests of different actors at stake. The article ultimately aims at challenging a normative and state-centric understanding of ‘securitiarian’ processes in North Africa, by also highlighting actors’ multipositionalities, political groups shifting interests, intra-group conflictual relationships and new trans-ideological divides in two different contexts characterized by deep political changes.

The narrative of a particularly conflictual parliamentary affair generally tends to put the emphasis on the final moments of the inter-party negotiation in order to emphasize the coherence or inconsistency of that party or that deputy or senator. The troubled approval of the so-called "Cirinnà law" on same-sex civil unions often seems to be reduced to a final twist of fate. A careful reading of the parliamentary debates shows, beyond the communication strategies used in the public arena, some rather clear ideological positions on central issues of the debate, i.e. the equalization of same-sex civil unions to marriage and the possibility of the stepchild adoption within same-sex civil unions. In order to identify these different positions, about 250 MPs’ explanations of vote have been analyzed, according to the method of the frame analysis, which allowed to build 6 frames corresponding to 6 distinct positions, from the most favorable (equalization of same-sex unions to marriage, with recognition of the stepchild adoption) to the most contrary (to any form of recognition). In addition, a discursive analysis was conducted of the extra-parliamentary references mobilized by MPs during their explanation of vote, such as the reference to religion or the quotation of social movements arguments or references to mobilizations for and against the bill conflicting in the public space outside the Parliament. Positionning MPs declarations within these frames raises questions about the divisions that persist between the right and the left on issues concerning gender, sexuality and the family, and about the contents of these divisions, but also about divisions that cleave the political parties themselves – which could be understood as “moral cleavages”, cleavages that are produced by political views on moral issues or moral politics. The study and analysis of such divisions and “moral cleavages” therefore invite us to grasp the trajectory of parliamentary debate and its outcomes, not only as the result of inter-party strategies, but also and above all, as the expression of cultural worldviews and moral assumptions on issues that, in the context of contemporary democracies, are perceived and treated as crucial issues determining the future of democracy itself. SELECTED REFERENCES Benford, R. D., and D. A. Snow (2000). “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (1): 611–639. Ceccarini, L. (2008). “Unioni di fatto e divisioni politiche”. In Mark Donovan and Paolo Onofri, Politica in Italia. I fatti dell’anno e le interpretazioni. Edizione 2008. Bologna: Il Mulino, 259-280. Dona, A. (2019), “Who is afraid of ‘Gender’? Gender and Politics research between institutionalization and contestation in Italy”, Italian Political Science, 14: 3. Engeli, I., Green?Pedersen C., and Larsen L.T. (2012). Morality Politics in Western Europe: Parties, Agendas, and Policy Choices. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gamson, W. A., and D. S. Meyer. (1996). “Framing Political Opportunity.” In Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, edited by D. McAdam, J. D. McCarthy, and M. N. Zald, New York: Cambridge University Press, 275–290. Giorgi, A. and Ozzano, L. (2016)(Eds.). European Culture Wars and the Italian Case: Which side are you on?. Abindon: Routledge. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper& Row. Jasper, J., & Duyvendak, J. (Eds.). (2015). Players and Arenas: The Interactive Dynamics of Protest. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Lasio, D., & Serri, F. (2019). “The Italian public debate on same-sex civil unions and gay and lesbian parenting”. Sexualities, 22(4), 691–709. Norris, P. and Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit and the Rise of Authoritarian Populism, Cambridge University Press. Ozzano, L. (2015). “The debate about same-sex marriages/civil unions in Italy’s 2006 and 2013 electoral campaigns”. Contemporary Italian Politics, 7:2, 144-160. Ozzano, L. (2020) Last but not least: how Italy finally legalized same-sex unions, Contemporary Italian Politics, 12:1, 43-61.

Parliaments are normatively described as open fora where deputies discuss a range of issues and shape legislation in the attempt to represent the interests of different constituencies. Still, parliaments are not immune from gender gaps and biases: beside the numeric under-representation of women, previous research has identified gender gaps in roles’ assignment and in the distribution of speaking time between men and women, especially across certain policy areas. This article addresses the relationship between the descriptive and the substantive dimensions of women's representation along the Italian republican history (1948-2020), by exploring if and under which conditions Italian female deputies are more likely to discuss certain policy issues with respect to their male colleagues. Indeed, we expect to see a division in issue attention between traditionally male dominated-agentic issues and women dominated-communal issues. Still, we expect these gender biases in issue attention to vary over time in conjunction with a wider representation of women in parliament and a gradual change of gender stereotypes in the Italian society. We test our expectations by applying semi-supervised text analytic techniques to a novel dataset on Italian parliamentary debates that that spans over a period of 73 years (1948-2020).

The pandemic has returned to the centre stage concerns over gender parity, whose recent progress have been halted as collateral damage of Covid-19 mitigation policies. At the same time, women have been largely under-represented in decision-making concerning the health crisis and the reconstruction effort. Such a dynamic parallels growing pressure from women interest groups against the marginal attention to gendered concerns in the fight against the pandemic and in the recovery. As a result, the outbreak and its response raise the question of the importance of representation for the saliency of policies supporting gender empowerment. The National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), designed at the national level in order to access common European funding provided by Next Generation EU (NGEU) for the post-pandemic reconstruction, offers a well-defined case for such an assessment, of particular relevance given the vocal campaigns aimed at increasing the attention to gendered policies within the plan. The analysis considers (i) the positions of Italian gendered interest groups, (ii) their saliency in parliamentary debates and in the broader policy discourse and (iii) the extent to which female policy-makers display higher sensitivity to such concerns. Our argument is that representation matters for gender empowerment policies as (under-represented) female policy makers are those primarily raising such concerns in the making of the Italian NRRP, along with gendered interest groups in the broader policy debates. Our findings based on manual coding and automated text analysis of 226 parliamentary speeches on the Italian NRRP support the primacy - albeit with marked heterogeneities across party lines - of female MPs in raising gendered concerns. In parallel, the automated text analysis of tweets on the NRRP and NGEU similarly confirms the centrality of women interest groups in raising the saliency of gendered themes within the policy debate.

Nel panorama italiano contemporaneo di pratiche e di politiche sul tema della salute riproduttiva, le donne sembrano scontare una visione che le vede come “elemento necessario” per risolvere quello che viene definito “l’inverno demografico” del nostro Paese. Il paper argomenta la questione alla luce delle argomentazioni di Ergas e Jenson che in un recente volume parlano di una sorta di scambio semantico che sarebbe avvenuto nel corso dei decenni a causa del quale un approccio femminista alla costruzione di politiche sarebbe stato scambiato e sovrapposto di fatto ad una visione maternalista (Ergas, Jenson et alii 2017), facendo in questo modo perdere alle donne spazio di libertà e di esercizio dei propri diritti di autodeterminazione, in particolar modo rispetto al corpo e permettendo dentro questo equivoco la costruzione di contesti e frame socio-culturali rispetto all’essere madre, alla gravidanza e ai figli nonché al concetto di famiglia, che ancora oggi costruiscono l’impalcatura teorica delle politiche sociali in Italia. La convocazione degli “Stati generali della natalità” promossa dal forum delle famiglie (14 maggio 2021) sembra confermare quest’ipotesi, stringendo invece che allentando il nodo della schiavitù del lavoro riproduttivo per le donne. Il paper vuole mettere in luce come questo tipo di “campagna di ripopolamento del Paese”, per altro in chiara connessione e in ripresa della campagna 2016 segnata dall’insuccesso del “fertility day” (Saraceno, 2016), giunga in un momento in cui la situazione economica post-pandemica sta di fatto richiudendo tra le mura di casa molte donne che, perdendo il lavoro salariato, si ritrovano in casa a fare solo lavoro gratuito, perdendo di fatto potere contrattuale sulla divisione familiare del carico di cura (Del Re, 2021). Momento in cui per altro il numero di donne in politica è crescente, le questioni di genere parità e inclusione sono tema da agenda politica a tutti i livelli, locali e nazionali. Più donne in politica non cambiano le retoriche? rafforzano gli stereotipi? E' questo lo scenairo che abbiamo davanti? Rispetto a questo alcuni dati da recenti ricerche in ambito locale verranno presentati. ma vi è un’ulteriore domanda cui si cercherà di argomentare una risposta in questo paper, e cioè il modo in cui queste politiche apparenetmente a favore delle donne ma in realtà di mero "ripopolamento" ,sembra essere finanziato: siamo certi e certe che “il bonus per i figli” dal settimo mese ai 21 anni e il cosiddetto reddito universale di cui parla il governo non sia un modo per legittimare di fatto la collocazione delle donne in uno spazio preciso, quello della riproduzione? E se in termini demografici nulla cambierà? Per le donne sarà comunque passato il messaggio, cioè che l’unico ruolo sociale per le donne sia quello riproduttivo. In questo scenario che avvenire si profila dunque per le donne in Italia, strette tra patriarcato e capitalismo, con un welfare sempre più privatizzato e familista? Bibliografia essenziale ERGAS, Y., JENSON, J., & MICHEL, S. (Eds.). (2017). Reassembling Motherhood: Procreation and Care in a Globalized World. New York: Columbia University Press. doi:10.7312/erga17050 Del Re (2021), Produrre in assenza di corpi, in Morini C. (a cura di), L’enigma del valore, Effimera, 2021, p. 31-43 Saraceno, C. (2016), Fertility day: superficialità e fraintendimenti nell’affrontare un tema importante, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311908199_FERTILITY_DAY_SUPERFICIALITA_E_FRAINTENDIMENTI_NELL'AFFRONTARE_UN_TEMA_IMPORTANTE

Comparative research has observed that district magnitude is an important determinant of gender descriptive representation. While the biggest divide is represented by single-member district vs multi-member districts, many studies find a relationship also inside proportional systems. Empirical evidence on the role of the district magnitude, however, is not univocal: several studies have found a strong and positive relationship between district magnitude and gender representation, while others, especially those who have looked at the change in the structure of constituencies within the same country, have questioned whether larger districts increase female representation, while confirming that systems with single-member constituencies penalize women. In this paper I will analyse the Italian case longitudinally to try to better understand the relationship between district magnitude and gender representation. I will show that district magnitude is not an important determinant of gender representation and that single-member districts are not as unfavourable to women as they are thought to be.

This paper builds upon a previous comparative research piece on descriptive representation in Latin America, from 1991 to 2020, and focuses on Peru’s gender quotas experience and the way in which this mechanism has affected women’s substantive representation in the national congress. Drawing on Pitkin’s (1967) deep connection between different levels of representation (‘formal’, ‘descriptive’, ‘substantive’ and ‘symbolic’), the study aims at exploring the extent to which Peruvian increased female descriptive representation through gender quotas has contributed to a betterment on substantive representation, in terms of the ability to turn personal political priorities into meaningful political actions in the process of representing women’s issues (Schwindt-Bayer 2010). The analysis includes not only quantitative data, but also qualitative primary-level data collected through field interviews and surveys during the Peruvian COVID-19 pandemic; 30 congress women and men that had participated in the 2016-2020 term were involved in the study and thanks to their testimony it was possible to examine their political preferences and the way in which they could participate in parliamentary committees and other leadership positions. Horizontal segregation and political violence are also taken into account in order to understand what lies behind the increasing number of women participating in the national parliament. The Peruvian lesson, finally, allows the author to strongly question the Critical Mass Theory and to detect a double gender gap in political representation.

Electoral gender quota laws now exist in over sixty countries worldwide. A growing line of research investigates the impacts of gender quotas in national legislatures, but so far we know much less about the impact of subnational quotas. To what extent do subnational gender quota laws increase women’s inclusion and empowerment in legislatures, and the substantive representation of women’s policy priorities? To make progress on these questions, we leverage data from the Italian regions of Campania and Calabria. These two regions are similar in many respects, including socio-economic level, women’s employment, and culture, but Campania adopted a gender quota law in 2009, while Calabria has no such law. Using a mixed-method approach, we pair quantitative analysis of all legislative bills proposed and passed in both regional councils from 2007 to 2017 with qualitative interviews with regional councillors in Campania. While Campania’s gender quota law effectively increased the numbers of women elected to the council and their inclusion in the legislative process, our initial evidence suggests that these women were often not empowered to push through policy changes on issues like violence against women. Our qualitative evidence suggests that glacial legislative processes and a persistent masculinist culture can prevent women’s policy interests from being prioritized. Taken together, our evidence sheds new light on the conditions under which subnational gender quotas will or will not lead to meaningful policy change for women.

Political resources have been key factors in ascending party careers over time and across countries. Yet, we know very little about gender differences in political resources and how these vary in upward mobility. Which resources underpin party careers? Do the same resources back female and male career paths? This article builds on the Bourdeusian literature focusing on personal capitals as determinants of an individual’s power positions in society. It contributes to the literature by testing the gender-neutrality of Bourdieu’s key capital concepts, social, economic and cultural. The multivariate analysis draws upon an original dataset on national party delegates between 2004 and 2013 in Italy. Our findings support Bourdieu’s claim that social capital is the critical resource for political advancement but they reveal that endowments of resources do not count equally for female and male party activists, suggesting an uneven playing field. Our work has comparative relevance because gendered inequities in party office are pervasive across diverse contexts and party office is often a critical stepping stone for electoral power.

Históricamente Uruguay no ha sido considerado entre los países que expresaron trayectorias populistas. Toda su construcción institucional estuvo, en buena media, atravesada por el valor de la partidocracia. La bibliografía ha señalado la hegemonía de los partidos desde la construcción del Estado moderno, la instalación de la República, el perfeccionamiento de la democracia, el intercambio sobre las “mejores” salidas estratégicas de la dictadura y la construcción de su régimen de bienestar. Así, hubo desde el plano empírico señales concretas que mostraban el alejamiento de Uruguay de personalismos contenidos en estructuras partidarias sólidas, ausencia de mensajes mesiánicos y maniqueístas. Por el contrario, el respeto a la institucionalidad republicana y democrática fue señalado como un dato de larga duración y factor altamente influyente en la construcción de su cultura política. En buena medida, el siglo XX uruguayo y los primeros lustros del siglo XXI van en esa dirección. Sin embargo, las acciones y expresiones retóricas en el primer año de gobierno de una coalición de partidos de derecha (la Coalición Multicolor), representante de los sectores más conservadores de la sociedad, cuestionan esas verdades asentadas. Si bien discursivamente convocan a “todos”, al mismo tiempo niegan en términos materiales la inclusión en la sociedad de amplios segmentos de la población. El hecho de haber sido el país que menos invirtió para combatir las consecuencias más complejas de la pandemia: ¿Puede ser analizado como una estrategia de política pública para decantar sociedad? ¿Qué pasa con las expresiones renovadas de las derechas y la negación del conflicto y de amplios sectores de la sociedad? ¿Acaso no hay señales en ese sentido? Entendemos que el estudio del caso uruguayo en esta clave puede aportar importantes insumos para una mejor comprensión del fenómeno populista en la región. En este sentido, las particularidades históricas del caso traen aparejada la necesidad de rediscutir algunas de las categorías teóricas clásicas. Es preciso incluir dimensiones vinculadas a la economía política que reflejen/expliquen de mejor manera el origen/desarrollo de expresiones políticas afines a nuestra trayectoria, para así discutir acerca de la pertinencia de ciertos términos como “maniqueísmo” o “mesianismo” para explicar los fenómenos políticos y sociales contemporáneos.

This article aims to develop an analysis based on historical reconstruction of the populist phenomenon through conceptual paths capable of giving account of the constant and variable structural elements and their mutation in time and space. Despite its multifaceted expression, most scholars agree that the nature of populism involves an attitude aimed at weakening representative democracy resulting from liberal constitutionalism. This attitude is the consequence of visions that can have different origins. There is a collectivist view of society tending to re-propose the evocation of a Gemeinschaft as an alternative model to the open society based on the individual, on his free participation in the political community and equality before the law. The idea is that of an organic, uncontaminated community, custodian of values, beliefs and virtues oriented towards the common good. Otherwise, a formally expressed vision of the "people" can be found which flows conceptually into a "nation" as a rhetorical guile. The two perspectives will be analyzed in their different systemic consequences. In any case, the "people" are victims of the usurping elites of power and resources and constantly surrounded by enemies who conspire against their integrity and sovereignty. Who are the old and new enemies and what do they have in common? In what terms is the answer expressed? This analysis will lead us to understand the different characteristics in which the good of the "people" is expressed. What it tends to, when it is not a real authoritarian regime, is a "populist democracy" aimed at realizing the mirage of the people's government through instruments of direct, participatory and assembly democracy. The goal is to enhance the sovereignty of the demos on the systemic level with respect to the excess of constitutionalism in which liberal democracy would be the protagonist both nationally and in supranational institutions such as the European Union. But it is a will that, especially after the crisis and the decay of the intermediate structures of mediation, it is not reconciled with the representative model thus undermining democracy itself. Starting from these theoretical premises, this article develops a diachronic and comparative analysis taking into consideration the most important populist experiences of southern Europe and Latin America, in order to trace an evolution that takes into account the socio-cultural, organizational, programmatic and communicative dimensions of this phenomenon, considering cases in which these relevant political formations had governmental or opposition roles, and those who played both positions, in order to empirically support the reasoning underlying this analysis.

El sistema de pensiones chilenos, en el período 1925-1973, surgió y se reformó por iniciativa presidencial, pero el propio diseño del sistema otorgó atribuciones al Congreso Nacional, los que Diputados y Senadores aprovecharon para conceder beneficios y ventajas a pequeños grupos. Así se construyó un sistema en que se transaban beneficios previsionales por votos, que permitían a los congresistas alcanzar y/o retener sus cargos. Ello generó un sistema anárquico, inequitativo, desfinanciado y generador de inflación, que tres Presidentes de la República, de signo político distinto, consecutivamente no pudieron reformar para revestirlo de mayor equidad y responsabilidad fiscal. El paper analizará el desarrollo del sistema de pensiones de la vieja democracia desde la perspectiva conceptual del populismo y, conforme a ello, analizará las actuaciones de actores del Congreso chileno y los esfuerzos fallidos de tres presidentes por imprimir equidad y responsabilidad fiscal a la gestión del sistema de pensiones.

L’obiettivo del presente lavoro è quello di esaminare il comportamento politico di due attori populisti italiani che nel 2018 sono arrivati al governo: Movimento 5 Stelle e Lega e quali effetti abbia prodotto il governo bi-populista sulla democrazia costituzionale. A partire dalla letteratura classica e dagli approcci che hanno descritto la democrazia come mix di sostanza e forma (si veda, in particolare, Morlino, 2003), cercheremo di misurare l’impatto dei provvedimenti adottati, del linguaggio istituzionale e di quello non istituzionale su tre dimensioni della democrazia rappresentativa: a) Lo stato di diritto (rule of law); b) Il ruolo dei poteri terzi e delle non-majoritarian institution; c) La concezione della rappresentanza. Un tema ormai classico della letteratura sul populismo riguarda il rapporto tra la concezione populista della società e la politica e la democrazia. Diversi studiosi hanno identificato nel populismo un rischio per i valori democratici e liberali (Zakaria, 2003; Mudde, 2004; Pappas, 2019). Altri (Müller, 2016; Urbinati, 2019) hanno rintracciato nel populismo un rischio di sfiguramento della democrazia, pur senza che esso determini necessariamente un cambio di regime. In antitesi a queste letture, troviamo autori che interpretano l’affermazione populista in maniera positiva, nei termini di stimolo, di urgenza (Taylor, 2016) di opportunità di rilancio delle delegittimate istituzioni democratiche (Tännsjö, 1992; Postel, 2007), di affermazione necessaria della sfera del politico su quella dell’economico e come manifestazione “contro-democratica” (Rosanvallon, 2017) che spinge gli attori verso il miglioramento delle policy.Di recente, l’attenzione degli studiosi si è spostata sul rapporto tra governo populista e democrazia. All’interno delle letture pessimistiche, questo rapporto è stato teorizzato in maniera differente. Secondo alcuni autori (Mudde, 2004; Mounk, 2018) la democrazia populista rappresenta una minaccia per la componente liberale della democrazia, che intendono sostituire con una forma ispirata alla democrazia diretta rousseaiana. Altri autori (Baldini, 2014), riprendendo la teoria del “doppio volto della democrazia” di Canovan (1999) contestano le teorie del dualismo democratico e vedono nell’estremo maggioritarismo, nel rifiuto del pluralismo, nell’insofferenza verso i poteri terzi ed i contrappesi e nell’identità supposta tra leader e popolo un rischio per la democrazia nel suo insieme. Un punto che accomuna parzialmente queste analisi (che potremmo definire soft), e che le differenzia da altre che identificano il governo populista con un governo post-democratico o come passo prodromico all’instaurazione di un sistema autoritario (letture hard: Pappas, 2019; si vedano anche Kellner, 2016 e Riedel, 2017), è che entrambe non identificano i populisti al potere con una fuoriuscita dalla democrazia, bensì come limite estremo o come “periferia interna” (Arditi, 2004) della democrazia. Secondo un altro filone di pensiero (cfr. Berman, 2008; Akkerman et al. 2016; Stoker, 2019), l’ingresso nelle istituzioni, ed in particolare il ruolo di governo, produrrebbe una dinamica di graduale normalizzazione dei populisti in linea con la “logica dell’appropriatezza” teorizzata da March ed Olsen (1989). La trasformazione, in tal caso, potrebbe addirittura estendersi oltre lo stile comunicativo ed il comportamento per riguardare finanche l’ideologia ed il contenuto dei programmi e delle posizioni (cfr. Roodujin et al., 2012; Heinisch, 2003). Il limite delle definizioni che si sono poste a questo livello di astrazione e generalizzazione è che tendono all’indistinto (rischio tutto-niente); accomunano cioè casi empirici sostanzialmente differenti occultandone le diversità di funzionamento, di strategie e di relazione con la democrazia. A questo proposito abbiamo individuato alcune caratteristiche riguardanti i due tipi di populismo, che abbiamo definito populismo conformato e populismo da contagio. Elementi distintivi del primo sono: la disintermediazione come forma privilegiata della conduzione politica,; la teorizzazione di una società pacificata al suo interno e di un popolo indifferenziato; l’idea che, depurandola dai guasti prodotti dalle élite corrotte, la società possa dispiegare le sue energie virtuose e produrre una ricchezza ed un benessere generalizzati; la negazione del conflitto sociale come costitutivo di ogni società e la sua sublimazione nel conflitto politico ancorato ad elementi moralistici. Il populismo da contagio, invece, nel caso della destra radicale populista analizzata in questo lavoro, presenta una lettura esclusiva/escludente del rapporto noi-loro declinato in chiave etnica; un accentuato nazionalismo; una lettura sciovinistica della distribuzione economica e sociale; la denuncia del fardello morale dell’élite politica tradizionale rea di aver favorito la degenerazione culturale e morale del Paese attraverso politiche troppo permissive sui temi dell’immigrazione e dell’accoglienza degli stranieri; l’appello al popolo unito davanti al suo capo, custode della tradizione e del passato glorioso della heartland; la denuncia delle istituzioni sovranazionali colpevoli di sottrarre quote di sovranità al popolo-nazione. Molti di questi autori, nelle loro analisi, hanno preso a riferimento le esperienze di governo populista in Paesi in cui la democrazia è una conquista recente e che i parametri del Democracy Index definiscono come democrazie immature, incomplete, di bassa qualità o regimi ibridi (Ungheria, Polonia, Repubblica Ceca, Slovacchia). Questi ragionamenti valgono se applicati a Paesi con una lunga esperienza democratica ed in cui i governi populisti devono confrontarsi con una serie di prassi, regole e principi che si sono consolidati nel senso comune ed hanno informato l’attività istituzionale per lungo tempo? E si possono identificare differenze nell’approccio al sistema democratico tra attori populisti differenti? È alla luce di questi interrogativi che si intende verificare empiricamente l’entità dell’impatto dei due attori populisti sulla democrazia rappresentativa in Italia. Più nello specifico: a) è possibile individuare anche dal governo elementi fondamentali della comunicazione populista nei loro discorsi istituzionali? b) Che tipo di approccio alle istituzioni democratiche hanno promosso dal governo questi due attori? c) Il governo di coalizione M5s-Lega ha subito o no una normalizzazione con il passaggio al governo? In definitiva, è possibile identificarlo come governo ‘as usual’ o come un tentativo di sfiguramento della democrazia? d) Nel secondo caso, quali parametri democratici sono stati intaccati dalla loro attività istituzionale? E quali parametri sono stati intaccati dai due diversi attori?