In the aftermath of a European Parliament (EP) election, there are normally two prominent aspects that receive attention by scholars and experts: the turnout rate and whether the Second Order Election (SOE) model proposed by Reif and Schmitt (1980) still applies. That model is based on the idea that, because EP elections do not themselves provide enough stimulus as to replace the concerns normally present at national elections, the outcomes of EP elections in any participating country manifest themselves as a sort of distorted mirror of national (Parliamentary) elections in that country. The mirror is distorted because those national concerns are modified, not so much by the concerns arising from the European context in which EP elections are held as simply by the fact that EP elections are not national elections. In particular, at EP elections, national executive power is not at stake. The same party or parties will rule in each country after an EP election as ruled there before.

Relying on Foucault's concept of pastoral power, the article scrutinizes the role of religious officers who are employed by Turkey's Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) and serve Turkish Muslim communities in Europe. It investigates how state-led diaspora institutions operate at a micro-level and what they reveal about the state's governmentality outside its territory. In order to parse the pastoral actors' empirically visible agency, the work draws on ethnographic observations of the religious officers' activities in the Diyanet's mosques in Austria. It outlines (i) how Diyanet officers' pastoral practices go beyond the mosques and manifest in a wide range of socio-cultural religious services aimed at reaching diaspora communities, (ii) the relation between Diyanet officers' activities and the Turkish state's extraterritorial practices and discourse aimed to promoting obedience to the authorities and love for the motherland, and (iii) how the interaction between Diyanet officers and the flock shape people's perception of themselves as a community while remapping the boundaries of a Turkish and Muslim belonging in essentialist terms.

Sustainable development provisions have become an integral part of the European Union's (EU's) ‘new generation’ trade agreements. Yet, a growing number of empirical works show that their design varies significantly, even in the trade agreements signed with countries at similar (low) levels of development. We contend that this variation can be accounted for by discussing how the growing integration of the EU economy with specific developing countries across global value chains (GVCs) affects the domestic politics of regulatory export in the EU. European firms that operate within GVCs rely on imports of inputs produced in low-labor cost countries. These firms tend to oppose the export of those regulatory burdens that generate an increase in their imports' variable costs. The political mobilization of these actors weakens domestic coalitions supporting regulatory export strategies, which explains why the EU adopts a more lenient approach over the inclusion of sustainable development provisions in Preferential Trade Agreement negotiations with some developing countries.

In the last 30 years, Local Governments all over Europe experienced an intense season of institutional change of unprecedented width and intensity. This paper focuses on a neglected type of institutional change, a more indirect one – here labeled oblique-change – that however strongly influences the overall LG institutional change and local autonomy. Taking 2012 as the climax of the austerity period in Europe and Italy as a pilot case for future comparisons, this article shows that oblique-change matters to a considerable extent, and that it is much more frequent and highly impacting than expected. Moreover, it argues that bradyseismic adjustments provoked by oblique-change may turn out in an equally profound change of the local government's asset, as that induced by major reforms.

Political parties share a very bad reputation in most European countries. This paper provides an interpretation of this sentiment, reconstructing the downfall of the esteem in which parties were held and their fall since the post-war years up to present. In particular, the paper focuses on the abandonment of the parties' founding ‘logic of appropriateness’ based, on the one hand, on the ethics for collective engagement in collective environments for collective aims and, on the other hand, on the full commitment of party officials. The abandonment of these two aspects has led to a crisis of legitimacy that mainstream parties have tried to counteract in ways that have proven ineffective, as membership still declines and confidence still languishes. Finally, the paper investigates whether the new challenger parties in France, Italy and Spain have introduced organizational and behavioural changes that could eventually reverse disaffection with the political party per se.

This article seeks to enhance our understanding of the European Parliament (EP) elections in an era of populist and anti-European Union (EU) politics. Specifically, it aims to evaluate both the conventional second-order elections theory as well as an alternative approach that regards EP elections as an arena for conflict between liberal-democratic Europeanism and populist, extremist and euroskeptic alternatives. It does so by deriving a series of hypotheses from both approaches and testing these with party-level data from all EU member states in the context of 2019 EP elections. Our results challenge both explanations. Party size is a robust predictor of electoral performance in EP elections, and its effect is moderated by electoral system design. While large parties lost votes across the EU, their losses were more pronounced in countries where national legislatures are elected under plurality or mixed systems. We find no evidence of incumbent losses or electoral cycle effects. Party-level populism, extremism and euroskepticism did not systematically predict electoral performance but party ideology appears to have moderated the effects of incumbency and party size. Incumbency was associated with vote gain among populist and far-right parties but not other parties, and the effect of size also varied across party ideologies. In sum, these results suggest that vote fragmentation in the 2019 EP elections is partly explained by electoral system design, while it was not driven by the desire to punish political incumbents. Populist and far-right parties in power appear to be particularly immune to punishing behavior often associated with EP elections.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) has irrefutably reached ‘great power’ status. As a consequence, most studies argue that it has adopted a revisionist posture towards the US-led international order. However, this image tells us little about Beijing's revisionist strategy, particularly whether it is revolutionary or incremental and what this implies in terms of actual policies. The current article posits that the PRC is behaving as an incremental revisionist and aims at tracing its modes. To verify this hypothesis, the analysis focuses on Beijing's policies towards its regional security order. In this light, it diachronically compares post-Cold War China (1989–2019) with the paradigmatic case of a revolutionary revisionist in the Indo-Pacific region: Shōwa Japan in the Interwar period (1926–1941). The findings offer a helpful contribution to the literature, providing the foundation for a more nuanced theoretical definition of incremental revisionism.

Are European Parliament (EP) elections still second-order? In this article, we test the classical model at the individual level in contrast to an alternative ‘Europe matters’ model, by investigating the relative importance of domestic vs. European Union (EU)-related issues among voter-level determinants of aggregate second-order effects, that is, individual party change. We do so by relying on an original, CAWI pre-electoral survey featuring a distinctively large (30) number of both domestic and EU-related, positional and valence issues, with issue attitudes measured according to the innovative ICCP scheme (De Sio and Lachat 2020) which includes issue positions, issue priorities and respondents' assessment of party credibility on both positional and valence goals. Leveraging the concept of ‘normal vote’, we estimate multivariate models of electoral defections from normal voting separately for general and European elections, based on issue party credibility. This allows us to assess: (a) the distinctiveness of the two electoral arenas in terms of issue content; and (b) the relative impact of EU-related and domestic issues on defections of Italian voters. Our findings show that although second-order effects are still relevant in accounting for results in EP elections, vote choice in the latter is also partly due to specific effects of certain policy issues, including some related to the European dimension. This indicates that EP elections have their own political content, for which Europe matters even after controlling for the importance that EU-related issues have acquired in national elections.

Over recent years, a new transnational conflict has been deemed to be structuring political conflict in Europe. Several scholars have posited the emergence of a new ‘demarcation’ vs. ‘integration’ cleavage, pitting the ‘losers’ and ‘winners’ of globalization against each other. This new conflict is allegedly structured along economic (free trade and globalization), cultural (immigration and multiculturalism), and institutional [European Union (EU) integration] dimensions. From an empirical viewpoint, it is still a matter of discussion whether this conflict can be interpreted as a new cleavage, which could replace or complement the traditional ones. In this context, the European Parliament (EP) elections of 2019 represent an ideal case for investigating how far this new cleavage has evolved towards structuring political competition in European party systems. In this paper, by relying on an original dataset and an innovative theoretical and empirical framework based on the study of a cleavage's lifecycle, we test whether a demarcation cleavage is structuring the European political systems. Moreover, we assess the evolution of this cleavage across the 28 EU countries since 1979 and the role it plays within each party system. The paper finds that the demarcation cleavage has emerged in most European countries, mobilizing over time a growing number of voters. In particular, this long-term trend has reached its highest peak in the 2019 EP election. However, although the cleavage has become an important (if not the main) dimension of electoral competition in many countries, it has not reached maturity yet.

How do voters sort within an electoral coalition? Voting literatures on ideology, character valence, and issue ownership provide explanations for inter-coalition or inter-party voting, yet the coalition context remains understudied. Do voters in proportional coalition-based systems use the same ideological and issue-based heuristics ascribed to them in two-party systems that favor single-party government? Voting behavior in Italy in the 2000s is used to explore this question. This paper examines what motivates the voters of the large center-left and center-right coalitions, specifically whether ideology, economic issues, or other considerations lead voters to select their party of choice. Results indicate that, on average, voters select a coalition ideologically-proximal and deemed the more competent on issues, while they select a specific party based upon character and reputation issues. Findings thus suggest that voters sort for both coalition and party-specific reasons.

In recent years, the relationship between Italy and the European Union (EU) has worsened due to the emergence of an increasingly negative attitude towards the question of European integration. The growth in citizens' disaffection with, and hostility towards, the political elites is part of a more general trend witnessed throughout the EU. From this point of view, an understanding of whether, and in what way, the role of Prime Minister (PM) has been affected by this change of perspective, especially following the various crises affecting the EU in the last 10 years, would be worthwhile we believe. This article examines the political positions of all PM during the so-called Second Republic (1994–now), by means of a longitudinal content analysis. This analysis reveals that after 2008, and for the first time in the history of the Italy–EU relationship, PMs' speeches have included sharp criticism of the EU. In particular, two PMs (Renzi and Conte) have clearly rejected those conditionality mechanisms implied by the EU. The results of this study confirm the start of a phase of strong conflict/politicization in regard to the EU and its institutional functioning.

This article contributes to the broader literature concerning the study of the relationship between political elites and the EU, by focusing for the first time not simply on party leaders but on one of the most important institutional roles in the Italian political system (the Presidenza del Consiglio).

In many advanced democracies, mainstream political parties have been disrupted either by the rise of new (populist) parties or by hostile takeovers. In this article we argue that immigration attitudes have had a powerful impact on the strategic environment of political parties and leaders. We show, based on evidence from a comparative study conducted by YouGov in spring of 2015, that immigration attitudes had, by that time, driven a wedge between mainstream parties – those that regularly play a role in government – and their partisans. This ‘immigration gap’ opened up enormous space for new political movements to form, either inside existing parties or outside. Furthermore, we show that the representation gap on immigration issues is a relevant predictor of vote choice, so that parties are particularly likely to lose votes when they are more distant from their supporters on immigration.

The economic decline of Italy between the mid-1990s and the outset of the financial crisis is a critical case in European political economy because its model of capitalism was deeply reformed at the time when its decline commenced. This paper argues that the Italian economic stagnation cannot be attributed to the lack of market-friendly reforms in a globalized economic context, as argued by previous literature. Instead, Italian economic decline is a consequence of institutional change which on the one hand has destroyed previous institutional complementarities, and on the other hand has led to an incoherent, or ‘hybrid,’ capitalist setting. Under the lenses of the Varieties of Capitalism approach, this paper reviews the main reforms in the fields of corporate governance and finance as well as in the labor market. It shows that such reforms established new institutions alternatively apt to support both strategic coordination and market coordination, resulting in institutional incoherence, and mixed incentives. In the short-run, incoherent reforms have reduced the availability of capital to SMEs; in the longer-run, they failed to give actors incentives to pursue innovation. This paper contributes theories of economic growth/decline focused on the supply-side of the economy and it is compatible with other – non-rival – explanations focused on the demand-side.

This paper presents an analysis of the personalization of the vote in Italian municipal elections in the period 1993–2017. Considering the ability of mayoral candidates to attract more votes than those of the lists that support them, the paper outlines the socio-demographic and political characteristics of the candidates who receive the most personalized votes. Contrary to what one might expect, the most personalized candidates are the losing candidates, not the winning ones. At the same time, the candidates who present themselves as outsiders are more personalized: women; candidates at the head of civic lists; those who lead coalitions positioned at the extremes of the left/right axis; candidates supported by one or two lists. Thus, the paper shows the propensity of the Italian electorate to use the split vote to reward those candidates who present themselves as challengers, rather than the established ones, also in the more pragmatic context of local government elections. Moreover, while it is true that personalization is increasingly more important in the political and electoral context, the ability to create lists of candidates for municipal elections capable of obtaining the broad support of voters seems to count as much, if not more.

To what extent can the 2018 Italian general election be considered as critical? This article examines how the contributors of six volumes published in the aftermath of the election answer this question by focusing on three major dimensions of change in comparison with the 2013 election: changes in the patterns of party competition; changing patterns of voting behaviour in terms of socio-economic characteristics of the electorate; changes in the salience of issue cleavages and in the way new issues affected the electoral outcomes. The picture originating from the volumes under review is not so sharp as that emerging from the literature that flourished after the 2013 election, whereas several contributions stressed the revolutionary traits of that electoral contest. Despite the important changes observed in comparison to 2013, defining the 2018 general election as critical is adequate only to a certain extent.

How do economic recessions affect European citizens’ attitudes towards environmental policies? In this article we investigate the attitudes of European citizens towards environmental protection considering its importance both at individual and country levels and adopting a longitudinal view. In light of the existing research on the link between pro-environmental attitudes and economic affluence of societies, including Ronald Inglehart’s theory of post-materialism, we hypothesise that levels of economic well-being as well as trust in political institutions are important drivers of Europeans’ attitudes towards environmental protection. Taking into consideration some macroeconomic indicators and the environmental attitude of public opinion, our main results show that even in time of crises, citizens’ pro-environmental attitudes persist in terms of importance, both at country and individual levels.