Search results

This book examines the impact of Europeanization on the domestic politics of EU member states, focussing on agricultural policy, cohesion policy and employment policy with a detailed comparative case study on Italy.Though a founding member, Italy has often had an uneasy relationship with the EU and found it difficult to be influential in EU politics and to comply effectively with EU policies and institutional pressures. The main focus of this book is the analysis of Italy-EU relationship from a policy-based perspective, adopting the conceptual lenses developed by Europeanizati

AbstractIn the past fifteen years, the Italian welfare state has gone through various important reforms. Almost all social policy fields have been significantly challenged by the presence of both national and European constraints, and in different policy fields some fundamental principles of the welfare state have been questioned and changed. The purpose of this article is to present an analysis of the most recent arguments used for welfare state reforms in Italy, focusing in particular on one key question: have the reforms been formulated and implemented in order to increase the freedom of choice of Italian citizens with respect to social protection? After a brief introduction and conceptual clarification, each section of the article will focus on one social policy field (employment, pensions, health care) and discuss the origins and consequences of the reforms with respect to the freedom of choice of citizens. The main argument is that very limited attention has been paid in the national political discourse and reform design to the freedom of choice for citizens in welfare state policies, since other goals (such as cost containment) were much more crucial. The article will end with an overall assessment of the evolution of freedom of choice in the Italian welfare state setting.

In this article, we analyse the mechanisms of agenda setting by focusing on the determinants of individual attitudes towards crime and investigating the role played by the media. After a brief literature review supporting the relevance of the selected topic of inquiry and the presentation of our analytical framework, we study the persuasion effects of mass media. More specifically, we investigate how TV exposure can shape individual perceptions of specific issues such as crime, and then focus on the effects of exposure to crime news on voting decisions. Using the Italian 2001 general election as an important case study of TV power concentration, we provide evidence that media-induced agenda setting enhanced the salience of the crime issue in voters' minds during the 2001 Italian general election and contributed to the victory of the coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi. Interestingly, our results are partially driven by the switch of previous left-wing voters to voting for the centre right because of exposure to crime news.

Academic attention to populism has sharply increased in recent years. Yet, a commonly accepted definition is still lacking, with scholars disagreeing on categorization, labels, and boundaries between its different manifestations. In this article, through an analysis of Euromanifestos and party statutes, we address the interactions between Italian political parties and populism by adopting the various definitions available in populism theory, that is, populism as (i) ideology, (ii) rhetoric, (iii) communication style, and (iv) organization. Our aim is to identify all major attributes linked to populism and empirically investigate them with lower level indicators, measuring and comparing them across Italian parties and over time. The empirical analysis, conducted through a formalized content analysis of the European electoral programmes and party statutes, considers populism not as a discrete concept but rather as a continuous one and therefore enables us to undercover the variety of populisms within the Italian parties. The main finding of the article is that over the last decades all Italian parties have shown some signs of populism and that the intensification of populist features is strongly linked to the exarcebation of the financial and economic crisis, and its governance.

Partant de l'approche du système politique d'Easton, nous considérons les élections européennes de 2004, 2009 et 2014 et la crise économique et financière comme des inputs du système politique de l'Union européenne (UE). Du côté des outputs , la politique sociale ne faisait pas partie des priorités de l'agenda politique de l'UE avant même la crise. Pour comprendre cette discordance entre inputs (les demandes sociales) et outputs (les résultats), nous examinons si et dans quelle mesure les inputs ont modifié les relations de pouvoir entre les principaux acteurs du système politique européen. Nous formulons la thèse selon laquelle si l'on pouvait s'attendre à ce que la crise fasse naître une demande de politiques sociales à l'échelle européenne, les acteurs favorables à un approfondissement de la construction économique et aux politiques d'austérité ont été confortés dans leur action par les résultats électoraux. Nous étayons notre thèse à l'aide de données empiriques originales.

Over the past two decades, activation has become a rather fashionable European trend for policies in the area of welfare and work, facilitating the job inclusion especially of the long‐term unemployed and other disadvantaged groups. The activation paradigm implies important challenges for related policy fields and the organisational provision of individualised, client‐centred training, skills development and counselling services. The main aim of this Supplement is to shed new light on the ways through which activation strategies have been translated in policies and new governance arrangements. More specifically, the five articles in this Supplement deal with two essential challenges of current activation policies: (i) the tightrope walk between cost‐effectiveness and comprehensive support; and (ii) the different facets and combinations of systemic coordination, collaboration, marketisation, decentralisation and individualisation.

Marquées par l'empreinte Bismarckienne et les spécificités typiques de l'Europe du Sud du régime d'État providence italien, les politiques sociales et les politiques d'emploi italiennes ont traditionnellement connu un écart avec la politique sociale européenne émergente. Au cours des deux dernières décennies, des pressions adaptatives importantes ont conduit à l'adoption de différentes réformes incitées par des « contraintes externes », en particulier européennes. Cet article s'intéresse aux transformations des politiques publiques et aux dynamiques politiques en matière de retraites et d'emploi, identifiant ainsi trois phases de réforme entre 1990 et 2012. Depuis 2009, la phase la plus récente d'« urgence nationale » a permis aux responsables politiques italiens de faire adopter deux réformes majeures en matière d'emploi et de retraites. À la différence des réformes précédentes, ils ont fait passer ces réformes en dépit des réticences des syndicats et de l'opposition et les ont de facto imposées en se réclamant de Bruxelles auprès d'une population de plus en plus eurosceptique. Comme le montre cet article, les contraintes européennes se sont donc récemment transformées en « conditions suffisantes » pour les réformes sociales en Italie alors même que les marges de manœuvre des acteurs nationaux dans ce domaine ont fortement diminuées.

Political consumerism has become one of the most promising research fields in social movement and political participation studies. However, most research has focused mainly on the more personalized and less collective version of such forms of action, leaving largely unexplored the nature and dynamic of some new local grassroots organizations (such as the so-called Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale, or Solidarity Purchasing Groups [SPGs] in Italy). The influence of such forms of political participation in contemporary democracies has been scarcely investigated. The aim of this article is to provide an in-depth exploratory case study of SPGs in Italy, which more specifically focuses on the main definitional, organizational, and sociodemographic features of SPG participation. The article shows that the Italian SPGs are locally based hybrid pressure movements that go beyond conventional forms of political consumerism by adopting innovative organizational and participatory tools.

Conciliation policies have traditionally been very marginal and characterised by limited coherence in the overall employment policy setting of Italy, which is primarily designed to meet the needs and demands of the standard 'male breadwinner' model. Nevertheless, over the past ten to fifteen years a number of reforms have addressed conciliation issues in quite a new fashion. The aim of this article is to provide an analysis of the evolution of and changes in conciliation policies in Italy, looking in particular at the ways in which Europe has been used by national policy-makers, i.e. as a point of reference for proposed reforms. After a brief introduction, section 2 offers an overview of the traditional Italian welfare state configuration, and aims to highlight the (limited) effort made within in it to promote the conciliation between paid work and family responsibilities. The third section focuses on recent reforms, in order to assess the extent and dynamics of the changes. Section 4 considers the role played by Europe in domestic policy change, investigating whether and how Europe has been 'used' by national political actors to reshape the Italian policy landscape with respect to conciliation policies.