The datasets on the Italian political class provides two sets of information: (a) census data on a broad spectrum of individual-level variables on elected politicians, offering an updated mapping of the characteristics of more than 20,000 Italian representatives at all governmental levels; (b) survey data on politicians' attitudes towards elections, participation, public opinion, several national and international policy issues, and their views of political representation. Between September 2020 and January 2021, 2134 elected politicians at the local (n = 1917), regional (n = 128), national (n = 75) and European (n = 14) levels were interviewed, making this one of the largest surveys of the Italian political elites ever conducted and a valuable resource for researchers interested in the study of democratic representation.

The ‘waves and ebbs’ model proposed by Huntington in his 1991's The Third Wave has profoundly shaped how scholars interpret global trends of democratization and autocratization, but has also received criticisms, especially concerning its ability to explain regime change in the three decades following the end of the Cold War. I contend that, rather than an alternation between democratization waves and authoritarian ebbs, the post-Cold War period could be more fruitfully described as a phase of ‘regime convergence’ characterized by a tendency of both democracies and autocracies to shift towards hybrid forms of political regime. By showing that between 1990 and 2023 transitions to hybrid regimes significantly exceeded transitions in other directions, I demonstrate the empirical relevance of hybridization as a process affecting both democracies and autocracies, and I encourage renewed attention to this phenomenon distinct from both democratization and autocratization.

Regional cabinet members (RCMs) are key political actors in subnational politics, especially in federal systems or in countries that have undergone a process of regionalization or devolution, even though they are still less studied than federal or national ministers. Italy and its regionalization process represent an interesting case study to understand how and under what conditions members of regional cabinets can exit from politics or move upwards, or downwards the different tiers of government. By using an original dataset of 721 RCMs in ordinary statute regions we tested through multinomial regression analysis whether political and institutional or personal factors influence their movements (both legislative or executive) upward, that is, toward national and/or European positions, backward toward local (both provincial or municipal) positions or their exit from politics. Our results show that both political–institutional and individual factors matter. In particular, displaying a previous national career favors upward movements while being a technician or independent favors the exit from politics.

This paper analyses Italian party positions on the EU's response to the Russo-Ukrainian war, singling out the adoption of sanctions against Russia, the provision of military support to Kiev, enlargement to Ukraine and the welcoming of Ukrainian refugees into the Union's territory as the four main dimension of such a response. The paper draws on the literatures on cleavage politics, the inverted U curve and the differentiated forms of politicisation, thereby testing theory-driven research hypotheses through a qualitative content analysis of Italian parties' Facebook posts in the three months following the outbreak of the conflict, combining an inductive and a deductive approach. The findings show that party families are a good explanatory factor behind Italian party positions vis-à-vis the EU's response to the war outbreak as parties belonging to the same family shared a similar stance on the four dimensions of such a response. On the contrary, the Europeanism/Euroscepticism divide does not explain Italian party positions on the EU's reaction to the Ukrainian conflict as Europeanist parties split over the EU's provision of weapons to Ukraine about as much as Eurosceptic partis split over the adoption of sanctions against Moscow. Finally, the paper shows that policy issues in the EU's response to the war (such as sanctions and arms delivery) were much more salient for and contested by Italian political parties than constitutive issues (such as enlargement and asylum).

This paper contributes to the debate on the role of religiosity in party competition in democratic political systems by analyzing the role of religious practice and belonging in the 2022 Italian elections. By using the newest Italian National Election Studies dataset, we combine indicators of both religious affiliation and practice to show how the electorates of the main Italian parties are composed in terms of voters' religiosity, to highlight how these differences influence the probability to vote for each of those parties and to further investigate the relationship between religious affiliation/practice and voting behavior. Results show the emergence of an increasingly identity-based relationship between religiosity and vote within the Italian context. We find that religiosity – in the form of Catholic affiliation – maintains a direct effect on vote choice which is also partially mediated by attitudinal indicators, such as those toward immigration, homosexuality, and abortion. We conclude that party competition in Italy is mainly fueled by identity dynamics – and less on religious practice or beliefs – concerning the whole group of those who identify as Catholics opposed to the group of those who do not.

After 78 years of democracy, Italy continues to grapple with its recent past in the political, social, and cultural spheres. Its experience of fascism under Mussolini, its dual participation in the Second World War, and the continuous and still existent connections between the ideological factions of the 1930s–1940s and now render the country a rich case for the study of public history and memory. The specificity of these characteristics has often made Italian history and memory look like an outlier, shaped by circumstances difficult to compare with those of other countries'. This paper argues that contemporary Italian memory politics are in reality a valuable source of information about the kind of mnemonic discourses that may arise in other (Western) European countries, given the increasingly polarised and populist European landscape. Our study of discourses put forwarded by the post-fascist party Fratelli d'Italia reveals a set of mnemonic tools with which they successfully banalise fascism and chip at Italian public discourse slowly but surely. The comparison between this discourse and that of VOX and AfD in Spain and Germany, respectively, shows that these tools, ranging from nativism to policy (de)legitimation linked to fascist imagery, has started to transfer to other countries' political strategies.

This study provides a first empirical test of Margaret Canovan's influential argument on the relationship between democracy and populism, which posits that populism emerges as a consequence of the unresolved conflict between the pragmatic and redemptive faces of democracy. Despite its impact on scholars of populism, the implications of her framework remain untested. Using data from the EVS/WVS Integrated Values Surveys, we test Canovan's claims about the effect of ‘pragmatic politics’ on support for populist parties, operationalized as consensual democracies, economic and political globalization, and checks on government. Our analyses predominantly reveal no significant effects, and where significant results are observed, they indicate directions contrary to Canovan's claims, thus providing no empirical support for her claims. These results challenge long-standing assumptions about the relationship between populism and democracy, urging scholars to reevaluate existing assumptions and explore this intricate connection further. We conclude by suggesting some directions for future research to deepen our understanding of populism.

This paper investigates the composition of the internal policy advisory system (PAS) in a Napoleonic country, Italy, where policy formulation and advice have traditionally been dominated by the Ministerial Cabinets, legal competences, and with a clear influence of political parties in the selection of experts. Based on the literature on the PASs, we argue that the role of the governments in shaping the systems of advice is growing and discuss how different trends push towards a pluralization of the advisers in the Napoleonic systems. Our research undertakes a unique mapping of the internal PAS in the second Conte government (2019–2021), in order to show if the Italian PAS is becoming more plural, and who are the advisors (in terms of how varied are their characteristics, skills and mandates). Our analysis combines the descriptive mapping of the internal PAS with qualitative interviews aimed at better understanding the move from the domination of the Ministerial Cabinet towards a complex and loosely coupled network of advisors.

The article explores the discursive representations of Syrian and Ukrainian refugees in the European Parliament (EP). The theoretical framework draws on Critical Securitisation Theory, pointing out the implicit hierarchies that affect the European Union (EU) reception policies in terms of race and gender. The main hypothesis is that a stigmatisation process based on race and gender affects the representation of refugees in the EU. Against this backdrop, the manuscript delves into how speech acts can either cast refugees as urgent threats or even facilitate the de-construction of the refugee as a threat. These are investigated through Computational Text-Analysis tools, such as Word- and Bigram-Frequency Analysis, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency test and Structural Topic Modelling. On the one hand, contrary to expectations of a securitisation of Syrian refugees primarily based on race, what emerges is also a process of de-personalisation that helps justify the anti-migration stand of some members of the EP (MEPs). On the other hand, the assumption that deconstruction of the refugee as a threat would mainly occur through an emphasis on cultural proximity between Ukrainian people and the EU is challenged. Instead, our analysis shows a gender-based victimisation of Ukrainian refugees, which contributes leading to protective measures being enacted by the EU.

This article presents a longitudinal comparative analysis of the regulation of private funding to political parties in 15 West European democracies and explores how these rules have changed under the most recent wave of political finance reforms. In particular, the article questions whether a deregulation of political finance regulation may be in sight, with a downsizing of the role of the state in the political finance domain. While evidence does not support a clear movement toward deregulation, the article shows that the move from private to public subsidization may not be that irreversible as it seemed and that private funding to political parties is likely to become more prominent in the near future also in Europe.

This article aims to explain the deviant German case of an early and comprehensive regulation of party donations (combining a high level of transparency and incentives for small donations). Given the limited explanatory power of economic and institutional factors, the article emphasises the causal role of ideas for a policy stabilisation which occurred after 1993. A process-tracing analysis suggests that the 1983–1993 reform period was characterised by a conflict of ideas. During this conflict, ideas regarding undisclosed donations as an anti-democratic interference with democratic political competition came to prevail over ideas regarding all donations as a necessary condition for democratic competition irrespective of their regulation. The key actors in this conflict were, on the one hand, the new Green party which resuscitated the idea of donations being potentially anti-democratic and, on the other hand, the Constitutional Court which ultimately endorsed this ideational legacy promoted by the Greens. After 1993, donations in Germany came to be accepted as a necessary evil whose anti-democratic potential had to be limited by transparency obligations and incentives for small donations. The findings presented here suggest that policymakers need to link attempts to regulate party donations to ideational legacies (if available) to successfully tackle political corruption.