1,721,108 research outputs found
The Effects of Democratization in Party Leadership Selection. A Comparative Analysis of Five Western European Countries
No full textThe last decades have seen an increase in the use of primary elections and one-member-one-vote systems to select party leaders and election candidates. Despite significantly increased attention to this from the contemporary political science literature, there is still a lack of truly comparative works at the European level. The book addresses this gap in our understanding by analyzing one hundred leadership elections – selecting party chairs and chief executive candidates at the national level – carried out by the mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties in five Western European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom) over the last thirty years. In doing so, this book proposes a new theoretical framework for empirically assessing the extent to which Western European parties have adopted more inclusive procedures of selection, and investigates the impact of these procedures on the divisiveness of leadership elections, party leaders’ survival in office and parties’ electoral performance
Le primaires citoyennes del Parti Socialiste (2011) e le primarie di Italia Bene Comune (2012): molte somiglianze, esiti diversi.
No full textFrom ‘Foreign Body’ to PD Leadership and Beyond. Explaining Matteo Renzi’s Path to Power through the Evolution of his Primaries’ Voters
No full textThis article examines the path to power of the current Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, by assessing the evolution of his voters’ characteristics between the 2012 and 2013 national primaries. The analysis is based on two extensive data sets the author herself has created together with the other members of the standing group, ‘Candidate and Leader Selection’, working within the Società Italiana di Scienza Politica (Italian Society of Political Science). The socio-demographic and political characteristics of participants in the primaries are described, while the characteristics of Renzi’s voters (RVs) are compared to those of non-Renzi voters (NRVs) and to the averages for the primaries’ participants generally. The findings clearly demonstrate that in the space of only one year RVs changed significantly: in 2012 they perfectly reflect the role of ‘foreign body’ played by their own candidate, who strongly distinguished himself from the primaries’ other candidates by gaining higher-than-average support among young voters and people having a centrist or even a right-wing political background. By contrast, in 2013 RVs become much more similar to the traditional left-wing and aged electorate used to voting in primary elections organised by the Democratic Party (PD) or the centre–left coalition as a whole. The analysis testifies that Renzi faced a kind of ‘normalisation’ in the eyes of the centre-left’s sympathisers, something that was both a cause and an effect of his acceptance by the party elite – an acceptance that allowed him to become PD general secretary first, and Prime Minister immediately thereafter
Candidate selection methods and electoral performance in comparative perspective
No full textThe purpose of the article is try to assess whether inclusive procedures of selection are more likely to appoint a candidate who can be competitive in the general elections compared with less inclusive ones. Accordingly, I took into account nomination processes (NPs) to select/appoint the prime ministerial/ presidential candidate for general elections held in four Western European countries (France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom) over approximately the last two decades. Using an original data source and innovative indicators, I assessed the inclusiveness of each NP and the party/candidate’s performance in the following general election in order to look for a possible relation. The outcome shows a very weak negative correlation between the two variables. Thus, while it does not appear that inclusive systems of selection have a clear positive impact at the electoral level, it is likewise hard to maintain that systems such as primary elections cause electoral failure
Psicologia dell’emergenza in età evolutiva: Dall’infanzia all’adolescenza
No full textI disastri e le emergenze hanno potenzialmente un impatto altamente traumatico sul funzionamento psicologico dei bambini e degli adolescenti, la cui vulnerabilità dipende dal livello di sviluppo. La psicologia dell’emergenza consente di declinare le conoscenze e le pratiche della psicologia in riferimento alle situazioni critiche. Questo volume fornisce una completa e approfondita analisi, non solo teorica ma anche applicativa, dell’intervento psicologico con bambini e adolescenti. Dopo una prima descrizione dei diversi tipi di disastro e del loro impatto, vengono trattati i processi psicologici che risultano maggiormente rilevanti per la psicologia dell’emergenza, secondo la prospettiva tipica della psicologia dello sviluppo. Successivamente, le autrici presentano le principali conseguenze dell’essere vittime di disastri, non solo in termini traumatici, ma considerando anche il costrutto della resilienza. Infine, vengono passati in rassegna metodi, strumenti e interventi per monitorare e supportare i bambini e gli adolescenti in relazione alle diverse fasi di gestione dei traumi
Italy, the Sick Man of Europe: Policy Response, Experts and Public Opinion in the First Phase of Covid-19
No full textItaly was the first Western country to be dramatically overwhelmed by Covid-19, the first country outside of China to implement lockdown measures and, until mid-April 2020, the country in the world most affected in terms of number of victims. This article aims to sketch the evolution of the first phase of the Covid-19 crisis in Italy and demonstrates that the health crisis moved forward hand in hand with some typical shortcomings characterising the Italian political, administrative and institutional system. The incremental reaction by the unprecedented M5S-PD coalition government showed the huge difficulties in facing the most serious challenge since the end of WWII, with the institutional system already afflicted by its scarce capacity and the economy still recovering from the 2012 crisis
Something New on the Western Front: Twenty Years of Interest Group Research (1999–2018)
No full textIn a book published in 1998, Baumgartner and Leech argued that interest group research was characterized by “elegant irrelevance.” Ten years later, Beyers and colleagues linked this to a number of conceptual, methodological and disciplinary barriers which render(ed) the accumulation of knowledge in this bulk of literature difficult. Are those same challenges still slowing down the study of interest groups and lobbying? The main aim of this article is to review all interest group scientific articles published in the top 50 political science journals between 1999 and 2018 in order to answer this question. Our results show a growing community focusing on many themes, preferring quantitative approaches, and analyzing more and more case studies. Interest group research has never before been so lively
- …
