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Are governing parties able to shape social and labor market policies according to their ideological positions or are they overwhelmed by socio-economic and institutional constraints? The paper answers this crucial question by developing a comparative study on 19 OECD countries from 1985 to 2011. It investigates whether the location of governments on a continuous left–right scale affects four measures of welfare state generosity: namely, public spending in social policies, in active and passive labor market policies and the level of unemployment insurance replacement rate. The results obtained through an error correction model show that governing parties are unable to affect social and labor market policies in the short-run, when economic dynamics prevail. However, in the long-run, partisanship gains relevance: when the government coalition moves to the right, there is a negative impact on all the measures of welfare state generosity.

How do parties that have long been confined to opposition behave once they take the decision to support government? This article analyses the case of the three Portuguese radical left parties that took such a move in the wake of the post-bailout 2015 election. Leveraging the concept of contract parliamentarism and the analysis of different data sources through different methods, we show that the three parties adopted a similar strategy after agreeing deals with the centre-left socialists. Specifically, while keeping close scrutiny on the executive action, the parties have voted consensually on most of the legislation proposed by the government. In exchange, the majority of policy pledges agreed with the socialists were implemented by the beginning of the legislature. Based on these findings, the article underlines the importance for supporting parties of conducting a thorough negotiation of policy goals and the timing of their implementation before joining the government, and of pursuing an autonomous discursive agenda.

Within the context of the economic downturn in southern Eurozone countries and the imposition of new constraints on national policy-making, this article examines the congruence between party issue prioritization, during and after the electoral phase. This is done through a longitudinal analysis of four countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) and use of party manifesto and parliamentary question data. We found that between the electoral and parliamentary arenas, parties tend to emphasize different issues. However, this occurs in different ways across time, countries, and parties. We propose a measurement of issue congruence in agenda framing between the pre- and post-electoral phases to assess to what extent elections provide a guide for public policies. Moreover, we propose arguments to explain different results in the analyzed countries and across parties. We show that the crisis magnified the capacity of the opposition to maintain programmatic coherence – a helping hand for opposition parties (including the radical ones) that succeeded in boosting the relevance of their signature issues.

RiassuntoLa punizione inflitta, nel 211 a. C., ai Campani,municipes sine suffragio, per la loro defezione ad Annibale, era stata assunta da una parte del senato a paradigma anche per i soci Tarentini, nel 208 a. C., rei allo stesso modo. Tale valutazione politica poggiava sull’assunto che la pena dovesse essere commisurata alla colpa, indipendentemente dal differente statuto giuridico dei defezionisti. Questa è espressione della linea rigorista perseguita contro i traditori, tra alti, da Q. Fulvius Flaccus (conquistatore di Capua), all’opposto di quella moderata e pragmatica sostenuta da Q. Fabius Maximus (conquistatore di Tarentum).

Policy agendas studies analyse the dynamics of attention to policy issues over time and across actors and institutions to obtain insights into the functioning of political systems. The articles in this special issue draw on this approach to investigate key aspects of the Italian political system, with a special emphasis on the period spanning from the political crisis of the early 1990s to the watershed elections of 2013. They analyse a broad range of institutional and policy venues, including public opinion, political parties, the executive, the Parliament, and the Constitutional Court. While single articles address different research questions and focus on different institutions, they all share a focus on the dynamics of issue attention over time. This introduction provides a summary overview of the theoretical and methodological tools employed in the volume, highlighting how the study of policy agendas can contribute to the understanding of political systems and their change over time. It then summarises the main findings of single articles which, taken together, shed new light on several classic questions that have been widely debated in the literature on the evolution of the Italian political system.

Multiple crises shook the European Union (EU) during the past decade. First, the economic and financial crises that unfolded since 2008 shook the foundations of the European project and its monetary union. Then, the inflow of migrants and asylum seekers into Europe in 2015 questioned the EU’s ability to jointly respond to common political issues. More recently, Brexit came across as the corollary of a prolonged legitimacy crisis. These crises have not only affected the course of European integration but also provided novel issues for political competition within the EU member states. At the party-political level, populist anti-establishment parties have traditionally listed among the principal interpreters and drivers of criticism towards ‘Europe’. In this article, we empirically address the changing Eurosceptic frames adopted by populist parties during these crises and speculate on the reverberation of these frames in respective party systems. For this purpose, we focus on two cases: Italy and the Netherlands. Both countries present instances of populist parties of different ideological persuasions within traditionally Europhile contexts. At the same time, both countries have been affected to very different extents by the recent crises, allowing us to examine how populist parties have responded to different political opportunities.

A lively debate among students of parliamentary democracy concerns how coalition governments build their policy proposals. Some scholars maintain that government declarations mirror the position of the median party in parliament; others argue that these proposals better agree with the weighted mean of the coalition parties’ electoral promises. This article sheds light on this puzzle by investigating the role played by several political actors in shaping government declarations on two dimensions: the ideological left–right scale and a genuinely policy-based welfare scale. The results reveal that the agenda setters on the two dimensions do not coincide. On the left–right scale, the prime minister’s party plays a leading role. On the welfare scale, government declarations are affected by the party of the median legislator in parliament and by the parties of the labour and social affairs ministers. Furthermore, government declarations on the welfare dimension tend to drift rightwards with adverse economic conditions.

By focusing on the Facebook activities of eighty-three political leaders from twenty-six Western and Latin American countries, we analyze their reliance on elements of populist communication for their competitive strategies. By integrating both a communication-centered and an actor-centered approach to the study of populism, we tackle four major research questions: Do populist and non-populist leaders adopt similar communication strategies on Facebook? Is there any evidence of the so-called populist zeitgeist in such arena? What different combinations between the so-called three “elements of populist communication” characterize the communication strategies of political leaders on Facebook? Are there major differences between Western and Latin American leaders? The results of our analysis provide an important contribution to the existing literature on populism and political communication in different respects. First, the populist zeitgeist “thesis” does not apply to the communication strategies of political leaders on Facebook. Second, the spread of elements of populist communication in Latin America is considerably lower in comparison with Western countries, irrespective of party ideological background. Finally, this paper identifies all the logical combinations that can occur between the interplay of the different elements of populist communication, thus enabling the classification of the communication strategies employed by political leaders on Facebook.

Contributions to this study clearly support our initial hypotheses. It is observed, as expected, that the economic crisis has considerably decreased consensual behaviour in parliament. However, the nature of parties constitutes a crucial variable in order to explain the conduct of the opposition in the legislative arena better: since the outbreak of the crisis, radical parties have turned even more adversarial than before; whereas mainstream parties – who want to appear as a credible alternative to the government in office – have drifted towards more cooperative behaviour. Given the growing influence of the European Union on the legislation approved in response to the crisis, it was also expected (and demonstrated) that the traditionally pro-European parties would be more likely to cooperate on socio-economic issues than Eurosceptic parties. Finally, it has also been shown that timing also plays an important role in the opposition's decision either to support or to oppose the government: with opposition parties more inclined to contest the government's proposals when their chances of getting into power are higher, and vice versa.

The article presents a methodology for the research of cleavage structure in post-Soviet Russia on the regional level (municipalities as cases). This methodology is applied to the results both of the 2011 Duma election and elections to regional legislatures over the period 2012–14. The electoral cleavage map of today’s Russia is constructed on the basis of the 2011 election results. All Russian regions are divided into five groups by the degree of their political competitiveness: (1) the least competitive group of six North Caucasian republics; (2) the group of four regions with the single ‘authorities versus community’ electoral cleavage (Mordovia, Mari El, Tatarstan and Tyumen oblast); (3) the ‘under-competitive’ cluster of 19 regions (including Adygea, Bashkortostan, Kalmykia, Tuva, Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Kemerovo, Orel, Tambov and Ulyanovsk oblasts); (4) the ‘average’ cluster of 31 regions (including Moscow) and (5) the most competitive cluster of 20 regions (including Saint-Petersburg). It also concludes that the 2012 ‘party reform’ led to the ‘entropy’ of electoral preferences, an augmentation of political space dimensions and indirectly, a growth in the number of electoral cleavages in elections to regional legislatures (2012–14). It is recognized that in some regions the level of political competition has really increased, but the reason was not the appearance of new participants, but relaxation of administrative pressure on the strata depending on the state support. In these regions, especially in ethnic republics, not so much a liberalization of the electoral process but inter-clan conflicts took place.

The purpose of this article is to provide an analysis of the relationship between political parties and the Monti government, which was established during the most acute phase of the ongoing economic crisis. We identify the strategic calculations of political parties as being the crucial variable that explains both the advent of the emergency government’ and its workings. Indeed, the new technocratic government was largely considered as the best temporary solution by both the previous outgoing centre-right majority and by the centre-left opposition, although for different reasons. However, Monti’s arrival together with his team gave rise to what we might call ‘winners’, parties whose position appears to have been strengthened – the Democratic Party and the parties belonging to the Third Pole; and ‘losers’, parties that appeared to have become weaker – the People of Freedom and the Northern League. The main argument put forward in this paper is that the status of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ is not static. In fact, it can be subject to extensive change if parties progressively adapt their behaviour, over time, to change in the competitive environments in which they operate, especially by adopting a strategy that is coordinated with their electoral partners.

This article analyses the differences in voting behaviour of the selectorate and electorate of the Italian Partito Democratico (PD) in 2013, particularly focussing on the role played by leadership, ideology, and media in affecting voting decisions. We study the different motivations underlying the decision to vote for the PD in the 2013 Italian general election or for each one of the three candidates to party leadership in the 2013 PD leadership selection race. The empirical analysis uses 2013 Italian National Election Study and 2013 Candidate & Leader Selection data. Results of the analysis show that leadership evaluation has a stronger influence on the selectorate than on the electorate and that the perceived distance between voters and the party on the left-right continuum has a stronger impact on the electorate than on the selectorate. Moreover, the analysis underlines that media are substantially not a relevant factor explaining voting behaviour of PD’s electorate and selectorate. These findings confirm the relevancy of leadership evaluation in intra-party competitions and open a new perspective to study leader selection races.

Digital media are often blamed for accelerating the decline of political parties as channels for citizen participation. By contrast, we show that political engagement on social media may revitalize party activities because these platforms are means for both party members and ordinary citizens to discuss politics and engage with and around political parties. Using online surveys conducted in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, we find that party members engage in a wider variety of party-related activities than average respondents, but the same can also be said of nonparty members who informally discuss politics on social media. Moreover, the strength of the relationship between party membership and engagement decreases as the intensity of political discussion on social media increases. This suggests that political discussions on social media can narrow the divide in party-related engagement between members and nonmembers, and to some extent flatten rather than reinforce existing political hierarchies. Finally, we find that the correlation between party membership and engagement is stronger in Germany, where party organizations are more robust, than in Italy and the United Kingdom, highlighting the role of party organizational legacies in the digital age.

The interpretation by Italian scholars of the institutions of the French Fifth Republic was directly linked not only to the new French constitution and to the evolving practice of power in France, but also to the scholars' own judgement on the Italian constitution and on their changing perception of the role of the political parties within Italian republican institutions. Three main phases in the development of the interpretation of the Fifth Republic by Italian jurists and political scientists can be identified. During the first – extending from 1958 to the late 1970s – it was strongly criticized by most as anti-democratic. The second phase – from the late 1970s to the early 1990s – was marked by the end of anti-democratic suspicions; but only during the 1990s – the third phase – were the Fifth Republic's institutions proposed by some scholars as a model to be imported in to Italy.

Populist radical right (PRR) parties have recently enjoyed significant electoral results in Central and Eastern Europe. Ataka in Bulgaria, Jobbik in Hungary, and the Slovak National Party in Slovakia frame the PRR ideology according to the idiosyncrasies of their context and directly address issues such as ethnic minorities, corruption, and the European Union. This contribution provides insights into the electoral performance of these parties by combining demand-side and supply-side elements. Ultimately, this article suggests that interactions over minority issues and corruption could help explain the electoral performance of these parties. Populist radical right (PRR) parties have recently enjoyed significant electoral results in Central and Eastern Europe. Ataka in Bulgaria, Jobbik in Hungary, and the Slovak National Party in Slovakia frame the PRR ideology according to the idiosyncrasies of their context and directly address issues such as ethnic minorities, corruption, and the European Union. This contribution provides insights into the electoral performance of these parties by combining demand-side and supply-side elements. Ultimately, this article suggests that interactions over minority issues and corruption could help explain the electoral performance of these parties. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.