1,721,017 research outputs found
Much ado about something? Parliamentary politics in Italy ammid the rhetoric of Majority rule and an uncertain party system
No full textThis article deals with the transformation of parliamentary politics in Italy, between 1985 and 2001. An unsatisfactory performance in democratic terms and the bottom-up pressures towards a majoritarian democracy during the first part of this period created strong expectations of a new model of parliamentary representation. In spite of this, a quasi-majoritarian form of electoral rule and a totally renewed party system led to increased fragmentation within the legislature and to very uncertain relationships between single representatives, parties and coalitions. Focusing basically on the characters of political representatives and the relationships between parties and parliamentary groups, the paper tries to explain the reasons behind such a difficult process of change within parliamentary politics. The final part discusses the consolidation of parliamentary politics in Italy, and illustrates the conditions required if the risk of a permanent state of parliamentary fluidity is to be avoided. The author is grateful to giliberto capano, marco giuliani and cristina leston-bandeira for their comments. data analysed in this paper are the property of the centre for the study of political change at the university of siena. © 2003, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Back to a responsible responsiveness? The crisis and challenges facing European political elites: the 2017 Peter Mair Lecture
No full textIn his later writings, Peter Mair elaborated on the deficit of responsiveness showed by «mainstream» political elites, vis-à-vis the extremely responsive (but largely irresponsible) attitudes of a number of new challengers and populist leaders. This concern was expressed by Mair, in his posthumous volume Ruling the void, with the notion of the «withdrawal of the elites». This article moves from these concerned considerations, confirming that in the delicate scenario of the European Union, responsible domestic politicians still seem to be significantly distant from the positions of the general public. Actually, the difficulties of the elites to act responsibly became more and more evident in the past few years, when the consequence of the great recession have amplified popular mistrust and pushed representative politicians (even those belonging to traditional and Pro-Europeanist parties) to negative evaluations about policy coordination in the EU and a possible reduction of domestic sovereignty. Using fresh data about the attitudes of politicians and mass public, the article discusses the nature of such a difficult situation for large strata of the European domestic political elites, elaborating in the final part a few conditions to build a new phase of elite sustainability in Europe
Conclusions. The populism-sovereignism linkage: findings, theoretical implications and a new research agenda
No full textIn this article, an assessment of the sovereignism- populism linkage is offered, moving from the main findings emerged in the contributions to this special issue. The sovereignism- populism linkage is seen as a challenge for comparative politics: on the one hand, the copious literature already developed, particularly in the specific field of populist parties, offers a broad set of findings and stimuli. On the other hand, the huge application (and the abuse) of the concept of populism, which has been associated to a number of very different phenomena, make the discussion on its relationships with cognate concepts more and more difficult. The article offers a first attempt to review the knowledge on the sovereignism-populism linkage, defining a new space for the empirical analysis, and refreshing the research agenda, in particular regarding some classical themes in comparative politics like the ‘sustainability’ of political elites and the crisis of representative institutions
Il sistema bicamerale alla fine della XVII Legislatura repubblicana: cosa è diventato il nostro Parlamento?
Full text linkReady to run Europe? Perspectives of a supranational career among EU national elites
No full textCentred on the notion of supranational career, this chapter explores IntUne elite survey data to determine attitudes to rewards and career opportunities in a supranational context. After describing variance within the sample of economic and political elites concerning willingness for a supranational-level career, more intensive research on national political elites leads to a typology of different 'career orientations'. From the emerging fragmented and differentiated scenario, few politicians seem clearly oriented towards a career in Europe, but few explicitly exclude the perspective. Most national political elite tend to evaluate the supranational perspective positively, while being neither highly informed nor particularly committed to it. Country and party-specific factors seem to determine the compound framework of ambitions that marks the world of European national elites. However, other intervening factors, such as type of elite skills, social background, and perception of the distance between EU polity and traditional national institutions also have explanatory potential. © Oxford University Press, 2014
Political Science in the Italian University. Demand. Supply. Vitality
No full textPolitical Science is widely considered to be an established academic discipline, even in a country like Italy, where the penetration of empirical social science has been deeply constrained historically and culturally, and where there has been a clear predominance of other academic disciplines, including history and constitutional law.
Twenty years after the introduction of the so-called ‘Bologna Process’, and a few years after the implementation of the 2010 reform of the public higher education system, it is worth looking for a comprehensive description of the state of our academic discipline. This can be done by exploring some data about the role of Political Science within the Italian university system. More in detail, three aspects of the current state of Italian Political Science will be explored. Firstly, the dynamics of the educational ‘demand’ for Political Science is here explored through an analysis of its presence in relevant Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. This is even more interesting given the two dangers in the academic presence of Political Science: reiterated criticisms against the uselessness of social sciences, and the effects of at least two decades of anti-political sentiment, particularly diffused among younger cohorts of students. The second aspect tackled here is the capability of Political Science practitioners to respond to these challenges by presenting a credible set of academic subjects and increasing its visibility among students. Third, we will discuss the overall reaction of the community of political scientists to these decisive challenges by looking at the magnitude and variance of academic recruitment in the Political Science academic community currently active in Italy. The evidence presented in the article will offer some reasons for optimism, namely, the stability of the student population and the crystallisation of Political Science in the overall teaching supply. However, some critical elements are also evident: a persistent geographical imbalance in the spread of Political Science and difficulty in adapting to some new professional and inter-disciplinary courses. This will lead us to discuss, in the final part of the article, a grid of more specific and fine-tuned research questions on the future of Political Science in Italy
Revisiting Transnational European Consociationalism: The European Union a Decade After Lisbon
No full textThis article discusses the notion of consociationalism as applied to the EU and assesses whether the institutional and procedural changes introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon (ToL) and by the management of the Euro and refugee crises still warrant considering the EU as a case of consociational democracy. Our contention is that the changes introduced by the ToL bore the promise to strengthen the consociational structural traits of the Union but that the further institutional and procedural changes engendered by the management of the Euro and refugee crises have made the behavioral dimension of consociationalism all the more necessary just as the accommodating orientation of the political elites had begun to evaporate. We support this argument by looking at empirical evidence which allows us to offer a set of propositions on the effects of the recent crises on the attitudes of the European elites towards the future of EU democracy
A critical juncture ? The 2004 European Elections and the making of a supranational elite
No full textThis article considers the emergence of a cohesive political elite within the European Parliament. Moving from a short review of the literature and drawing on some preliminary data, the paper discusses alternative hypotheses to explain the recruitment and career pattern of MEPs and introduces a typology of members. Afterwards, the paper compares representatives of the new EU member states with the ‘pioneer parliamentarians’ elected in 1979 and with their colleagues elected in the 15 countries of the ‘old’ European Union. Signs of a new pattern of European political career appear to be emerging, thus providing a new possible set of explanatory hypotheses about the evolution of European Union representatives. † This article is a preliminary result of the work developed on MEPs' cross-national convergence in the context of the network EurElite, a project sponsored by the European Science Foundation. We want to thank the other members of the EurElite task force on MEPs, Stefaan Fiers, Ulrik Kjaer and Michael Rush, as well as the two directors of EurElite, Heinrich Best and Maurizio Cotta, for their valuable comments. We also would like to thank our colleagues from Central-Eastern Europe for providing the available data for the ACC-10 MEPs: Witek Betkiewicz (Poland), Béla Keszegh (Hungary and Slovakia), Mindaugas Kuklys (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), and Lukás Linek (Czech Republic). Stefan Jahr has also been involved in the definition of the codebook and in the process of data elaboration. © 2005, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
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