This paper examines the strategic use of public news media – specifically television (TV) – as an instrument of political influence, focusing on Italy's 2011 financial crisis under Berlusconi's premiership. Using an original large corpus of over 20,000 hours of televised news transcripts and a quasi-experimental design, we investigate how political influence altered media coverage and, subsequently, public opinion and electoral outcomes. Our difference-in-differences analysis, complemented by unsupervised text scaling of news content, reveals a significant shift from “hard” political news to “soft” news on public TV during Berlusconi's tenure. Findings suggest a deliberate reduction in hard news coverage by an average of 107 seconds daily, which significantly increased voter support for Berlusconi's party. In the conclusions, we discuss the broader implications of our findings for media independence in Western democracies amid the emergence of artificial intelligence-generated news contents and the prevalence of algorithmically tailored news feeds.

Technocracy is becoming increasingly relevant in Western democracies and particularly in Italy, a country characterised by four technocratic governments in three decades. Despite the growing number of dedicated studies, there is a persistent gap in the existing literature concerning the discursive dimension of technocracy – namely, how technocrats frame the historical context, legitimise their policy agendas and, more broadly, the establishment of their governments. This study aims to fill this gap by analysing the speeches given by four Italian technocratic Prime Ministers to the parliament when asking for the vote of confidence. Methodologically, we perform first the content analysis to map the themes addressed in the speeches, their quantitative relevance and variation over time. Then, we turn to critical discourse analysis to understand the specific argumentative strategies that legitimise policy action in five key and interrelated dimensions: context, legitimation, the state, European Union and political economy. The analysis seeks to answer three research questions: What are the main discursive strategies of legitimation used by technocrats? Do they change significantly between governments and over time? Do partisan policy options and worldviews emerge clearly, or do they remain under the surface? The paper aims to contribute to the theoretical conceptualisation and empirical analysis of technocracy by highlighting the subjective, performative and overall political dimensions of the phenomenon.

Although the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the USA and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Canada have elicited considerable domestic contestation in Europe, several other agreements have been negotiated into public and media indifference. What explains this difference? In this article, I put forward a number of arguments on the structural causes of the politicization of European Union (EU) trade policy over the past 30 years and test them against a newly collected dataset covering 19 preferential trade agreements. The qualitative comparative analysis suggests that the politicization of EU trade negotiations is determined by the co-occurrence of several, well-defined conditions. More specifically, it tells us that: (1) the Lisbon Treaty's reform of EU trade policymaking is the main driver of politicization, (2) the level of public support for the EU is of particular relevance when it comes to ‘deep and comprehensive’ agreements that touch on sensitive domestic issues, and that (3) high adjustment costs expected from trade liberalization can lead to the politicization of trade negotiations.

Across Western European democracies, the last 20 years have seen a growth of precarious employment and the rise of challenger parties. Both trends are especially marked in Italy, where occupational insecurity has become the norm and over half of the electorate has turned to a challenger party. In this article, I investigate the relationship between these two phenomena, addressing the question of whether and how precarity in the labor market influenced vote choice in the 2018 general election. First, I provide descriptive evidence that the Italian labor market shifted from dualism to generalized precarization. Second, I empirically investigate the relationship between precarity and voting in this context. The results show that the perception of precarity, not formal employment status, influenced voting behavior: it fostered participation, increased support for the Five Star Movement, and decreased support for the Democratic Party. These findings challenge core assumptions in the literature, first and foremost about precarious workers' low turnout rate, difficult mobilization, and consequent political irrelevance. They indicate that the electoral weight of precarious workers has increased, and their representation can be electorally beneficial.

In recent years, the rising number of LGBTIQ+ politicians across the world has been matched by an increase in academic attention on which factors foster or hinder their careers. Here, we provide a comprehensive analytical review of the relevant literature, with the goal of illustrating both its synergies and imbalances. We show that most of the existing evidence specifically concerns LGBTIQ+ politicians' electoral performance. Moreover, this knowledge has largely been produced in very similar contexts politically and socioculturally. Finally, we highlight the potential of investigating a number of additional factors that may impact LGBTIQ+ political careers, such as intersectional dynamics that may have a differentiated impact within this population. Future works could expand the scope of this literature by considering these elements and focussing more on the direct experience of LGBTIQ+ politicians.

This article examines the reception of the Iranian state's authoritarian discourse by the Italian far right to interrogate the mechanisms of authoritarian diffusion from the point of view of the receiving actors. Coding Iran's state propaganda and searching for overlaps and resonances with the far right's discourse, this article argues that the receiving audience selectively translates the content coming from Iran for the Italian public with the goal of reinforcing its own political discourse. The article contributes to the debate on authoritarian diffusion by providing fresh empirical findings from a rarely studied case study and by shifting the focus to political discourse and narratives. This article also foregrounds the agency of the receiving audience, rather than the authoritarian state's, with the goal of interrogating the resources and infrastructures that enable diffusion, rather than the motivation or the success of the ‘sending’ authoritarian state. This article expands the understanding of complex dynamics of authoritarian diffusion and contributes to examine the establishment of transnational connections between state and non-state illiberal actors in the era of ‘sovranism’ and right-wing populism.

One of the most persistent challenges in the study of regional politics in Italy is the lack of systematized data and information about the composition of regional legislatures and governments and the profiles of elected officials. In this paper, we describe the ITREGPARL dataset, a new comprehensive dataset of Italian regional politics comprising 6077 regional politicians from 1993 to 2020. It includes information about regional councillors, regional ministers, presidents and vice-presidents of the regional council, regional presidents and vice-presidents. Along with socio-demographic characteristics – gender, age, previous profession, education – it includes data such as experience and incumbency, number of mandates, length of service and partisanship. It also includes region-level variables, such as geographical area, type of gender quotas and the regional authority index.

This article investigates the pattern of economic voting at the regional level in Italy. It focuses on the elections held in 18 out of 20 Italian regions from 1995 to 2020. Retrospective voting is examined by using the theory of economic voting, measured at the subnational level. By providing some inferential models and controlling for the impact of phases of recession, this article tests the hypothesis whereby the incumbent regional government is rewarded (or punished) by voters in the event of a good (or poor) state of the regional economy. It mainly considers macroeconomic variables, focusing on the relationship between the unemployment rate (at both national and regional levels) and the electoral performance of the incumbent executive. The empirical analysis shows that, particularly during periods of ‘quiet politics’, economic voting also occurs at the local level and thus the regional unemployment rate affects regional rulers' electoral outcomes.

This article deals with the impact of intra-party transformations and access to power on the visions of political participation of activists taking part in populist anti-establishment parties with a strong emphasis on digital participation, using the Five Star Movement (M5S) as a case study. Going beyond studies conceiving the M5S as a populist and digital party, we argue that activists support a democratic ideal based on a civic culture involving a demanding role for ordinary citizens, who should be highly interested in politics and involved locally on a day-to-day basis. A negative vision of the Italian citizen judged as incapable of playing this role accompanies this ideal. Our article also demonstrates how political involvement in the M5S transformed the visions of activists, making them warier of direct democracy and more disillusioned about their fellow citizens. The analysis relies on qualitative semi-directed interviews with former and current M5S activists with diversified socio-demographics, political and participation trajectories in two Italian regions. More broadly, our article shows that the effects of entering government and intra-party reforms reinforcing the leadership at the expense of local activists are particularly strong in anti-establishment parties and clash with the conceptions of participation supported by activists.

After defeating the 20th-century challengers to the international order, the United States must today calibrate its response to the rise of the PRC, whose foreign policy poses problems both for policy-makers and IR scholars. Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and USSR have left a heavy mark on the scholarship on revisionist threats and their management. Like the mythological Titans, these states launched their challenge all the way to ‘Olympus’: they longed to build a new international order by war or a large-scale and long-standing competition. However, the myth of Prometheus teaches us that this ‘revolutionary’ path is not the only road for secondary states to gain primacy. Revisionism can also take a more careful shape, both by means and objectives. The article preliminarily discusses the understudied type of careful revisionism and distinguishes the subtypes of ‘incrementals’, ‘moderates’ and ‘gamblers’. These more nuanced forms compel status quo power(s) to face a dilemma between two strategic options: engagement or confrontation. Then it posits that a wisely gauged assessment of the careful revisionist challenge by the dominant power must inevitably lay at the basis of any grand strategy for preserving the status quo and preventing systemic change. Finally, it tests this hypothesis by investigating the confrontation between a dominant power – the United Kingdom – and six careful revisionists – namely the United States (1814–1860), the Kingdom of Sardinia/Italy (1852–1882), France (1875–1904), Russian Empire (1864–1907), Imperial Japan (1919–1936) and Fascist Italy (1922–1935).

In the aftermath of the 2022 Italian legislative elections, but also during the entire electoral campaign, several claims were made that much of the electoral support for the Five Star Movement had been triggered by the ‘Reddito di cittadinanza’ – the welfare policy introduced in 2019 by the yellow–green government. This research note first distinguishes between distributive politics and policy voting, and then explores the empirical relationship between the geographical provision at the municipal level of the citizenship income and the vote for the party led by Giuseppe Conte. While traditional multivariate analyses fail to reveal any spurious relationship, matching techniques help highlight the absence of any causal relationship between the two variables.