By means of a split-ballot survey experiment, we study whether a normative instruction not to use the internet when answering political knowledge questions reduces cheating in web surveys. The knowledge questions refer to basic facts about the European Union and the data come from the Italian National Election Study web panel carried out in Italy before the 2014 European Election. Our analysis shows that a simple normative instruction significantly reduces cheating. We also show that reducing cheating is important to achieve a correct assessment of reliability of knowledge scales, while a decrease of cheating leaves unaltered the knowledge gap between lower and higher educated respondents. These results invite caution when including political knowledge questions in an online survey. Our advice is to include a normative instruction not to search the internet to reduce cheating and obtain more genuine answers. More generally, we conclude by stressing the need to consider the implications of online data collection when building questionnaires for public opinion research.

Although there is a considerable amount of talk about transformative power of deliberation on identity, the debate in literature remains highly theoretical in underlying the benefits of deliberative model for EU Integration. So far, little empirical evidence is available on the actual impact of deliberation. Can deliberation enhance European identity? We specifically address this question by using deliberative polling quasi-experiment that involved random sample of 348 European citizens in 2 days deliberation on issues of European concern. The comparison of citizens’ sense of belonging to both EU and nation states before and after deliberation, allowed us to explore the effects of deliberation on identity and further test it against the control group. The analyses show that when European citizens are enabled to deliberate on European issues beyond national borders their exclusive national identity decreases and they become more community minded. The observed transformation of identities is further analyzed in order to explore the relationship between European and national identity. The analyses indicate that even after deliberative treatment in which European identity has been activated the relationship between multiple identities remains compatible.

Within interest group research, scholars following the population ecology perspective mainly look at the demographic features of populations and systems under scrutiny: density and diversity represent the main dimensions investigated. Even though, in recent years, an impressive amount of literature on this topic has been produced, there has been neither systematic analysis of, nor empirical research into, the Italian interest system so far. This article aims to address this lacuna. Following a diachronic perspective, we count how many politically active groups have populated the Italian interest system with regard to two different periods: 1984–88 and 2010–14. From 1984 to 2014 the number of interest groups almost doubled and the density of the system greatly increased; diversity, however, has remained relatively more stable.

How do voters attribute responsibility for government outcomes when they are the result of a collective decision taken by multiple parties within a coalition government? In this article we test the argument that in a multiparty coalition system, responsibility attribution should vary according to the quantity and quality of portfolios that the coalition partner controls. The article uses data from the Italian National Election Study in Italy, a country usually characterized by governments formed by more than two parties. We find no consistent empirical evidence that coalition parties collectively suffer from perceived negative performance. While the prime minister party is held responsible on average more than the other coalition partners, responsibility attribution decreases by party size in the parliament rather than by the quantity of ministerial portfolios the incumbent party controls. Issue saliency, however, plays an important role in the retrospective voting mechanism. These results have important implications for our understanding of electoral behaviour and democratic accountability.

This article assesses the strategies that the Italian student activists adopted in order to influence the revision process of the governance structure of their universities in 2011. Which kind of strategy has enabled these activists to influence more successfully this process? I argue that the joint pressure of insiders and outsiders allows student activists to get their voice more effectively heard from the university leaders than when one of the two forms of pressure is absent. The ‘power of the streets’ exerted by the ‘outsiders’, combined with the institutional power of the ‘insiders’, produces a significant amplifying effect in the governing bodies. University leaders fear this kind of alliance, as they perceive that insiders with a strong tie with other actors are the expression of a collective voice that is difficult to neutralize. On the other hand, the outsiders are also aware that their collective strength is more likely to be translated into institutional power and action from their allies and/or representatives. To empirically probe this proposition, I have singled out three Italian universities (University of Turin, Sapienza of Rome, and Federico II of Naples), which witnessed high levels of student mobilization in the past years (2008–13), and where student activists and their organizations adopted the most different array of strategies. More specifically, while at the University of Turin the student activists were able to deploy simultaneously both forms of pressure, at the Federico II of Naples and Sapienza of Rome one of the two forms was lacking.

The article tries to explain why China, after having launched a crash programme in the mid-1950s to develop a nuclear deterrent, did not formulate a clear operational doctrine with respect to the targeting and employment of atomic weapons until the mid-1980s. Propositions derived from neoclassical realism are used to shed some light on this puzzling aspect of China’s nuclear doctrine. The general hypothesis of the study is that, international predicaments notwithstanding, China’s domestic politics prevented the possibility of articulating a clear and detailed nuclear doctrine during the period following the first nuclear test, when such a doctrine was more necessary.