1,720,972 research outputs found
Government agenda-setting in Italian Coalitions: Testing the Using Italian Investiture Speeches 1979-2014
No full textDespite variations in institutional and political settings, comparative political research is consistent in pointing to executives as the main drivers of national agendas in parliamentary systems. After presenting a new dataset coding the policy content of investiture speeches of appointed Italian Prime Ministers between 1979 and 2014, this article offers a new strategy to test the partisan hypothesis, i.e., the relationship between ideology and the issue composition of executives' policy agendas. By comparing each pair of Italian governments' programmatic speeches through multivariate analyses, we show that the ideological distance of governments is a good predictor for agenda divergence in a multiparty- coalition political system
Reform Agendas in National Recovery and Resilience Plans: Partisan Politics and Domestic Usages of Europe
Full text linkThis article examines the agency of national executives in shaping the reform agendas within the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) under the EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). Through a comparative analysis of NRRPs drafting in Germany, France, Italy and Spain, and an in-depth longitudinal study of Italy, we argue that the partisan profile of national executives, to a significant extent, accounts for which reforms were included in the respective national plans, while the domestic usage of Europe by national executives explains how they went about embedding those reforms in the NRRPs. In terms of research design, we first match the reform priorities outlined in the political manifestos of the governing parties and those included in the NRRPs. Second, through a systematic analysis of press coverage, we sketch out how national executives leveraged (or not) Europe domestically during the drafting of their respective plans. Our findings contribute to shed light on the interplay between domestic political dynamics and EU-level requirements, demonstrating how governments navigated the tension between fulfilling their electoral mandates, building domestic support for their reform agendas and adhering to EU guidelines and constraints
Government failure, opposition success? Electoral performance in Portugal and Italy at the time of the crisis
No full textThe costs of the crisis in Southern European
countries have not been only economic but
political. Economic crises tend to lead to
government instability and termination while
political challengers are expected to exploit
this contingent window of opportunity to gain
an advantage over incumbents in national
elections. The current crisis seems to make no
exception, looking at the results of the general
elections recently held in Southern Europe.
However, this did not always lead to a clear
victory of the main opposition parties. In most
of the elections, in fact, the incumbent parties’
loss did not coincide with the official
opposition’s gain. The extreme case is
represented by Italy, where both the outgoing
government coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi
– setting aside for the moment the technocratic
phase – and its main challenger, the centre left
coalition, ended up losing millions of voters
and a new political force, the Five Star
Movement, obtained about 25 per cent of votes.
On the opposite side there is Portugal. Only in
Portugal did the vote increase for the centre
right PSD, in fact, exceed the incumbent
socialists’ loss. The present work aims at
exploring the factors which might account for
this significant divergence between the two
cases
From agenda setters to agenda takers? The determinants of party issue attention in times of crisis
No full textQuestion time represents one of the most relevant institutional arenas where parties compete to get their favourite issues on the parliamentary agenda. Parties select which issue to address by weighing up two commitments simultaneously: fulfilling the party mandate received by their voters at election time and responding to the current priorities of voters. This article assesses the extent to which the recent sovereign debt crisis impacted the way parties balance these two imperatives of democratic representation. Through the issue coding of around 10,000 parliamentary oral questions tabled in Italy, Portugal and Spain between 2003 and 2014, the analysis shows that the worsening of economic conditions intensified the impact of citizens’ priorities. However, there is no clear evidence of a decline in the importance of the party mandate for either the majority or opposition parties. These findings offer insights on the topic of party political representation in Southern Europe and whether it was affected by the Eurozone crisis
Stronger conditionality for stronger compliance? Analysing the NGEU’s effect on the implementation of European semester recommendations
Full text linkThis study examines the capacity of the European Union (EU) to influence policy change in its member states by focusing on the impact of EU conditionality under the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) introduced as part of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) package adopted in response to COVID-19 pandemic. Using data on the evaluations of the implementation of the 2019–2020 country-specific recommendations (CSRs) before (2021) and after (2022–2024) the official start of the programme, we assess to what extent the RRF conditionality impacts the effectiveness of the European Semester. The findings of our statistical analysis indicate that the amount of RRF funding received, relative to GDP, is significant for compliance. Other factors play a role: a higher problem load, measured by the average yearly CSRs from 2011 to 2019, and sector-specific challenges, like those in energy, negatively impacted policy implementation. Conversely, countries with an initially lower compliance with the Commission’s recommendations received more favourable evaluations. Similarly, reforms concerning financial and fiscal governance performed better than average. This paper contributes to the literature on the implementation of the RRF and its impact on the reshaping of EU economic governance by demonstrating that it has improved compliance with CSRs, underpinning domestic reform efforts
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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