Electoral competition is typically organized around an evolving set of policy issues. Recent Italian politics suggests a revival of two classic dimensions concerning the mode of interaction that defines the very goals of a polity: elitism (whether goals should be defined from the top down or from the bottom up) and pluralism (whether a polity should only accept widely shared common goals or whether multiple, alternative goals may legitimately compete). While these concerns possibly became less relevant in the heydays of the party government model, recent literatures on populism, technocracy, and process preferences reflect renewed interest. We introduce a two-dimensional elitism–pluralism scheme that explicates the spatial arrangement of top-down and bottom-up visions of party government vis-à-vis models of populism and technocracy. To demonstrate the relevance of the two dimensions for party preference, we turn to the case of the 2022 Italian election, which followed a sequence of a populist, a mixed populist-mainstream and a technocratic government. Voter positions from specialized batteries of the Italian National Election Study are contrasted with party positions from an original expert survey. Findings indicate that preferences on elitism and pluralism complement standard dimensions of issue voting. An explorative analysis of comparative data suggests that many countries across Europe have the potential for similar developments. Electoral competition increasingly reflects concerns about its own principles.

When observed in comparative perspective, until the early-1990s the Italian welfare state was clearly an outlier, characterized by an unbalanced allocation of resources among welfare sectors (so-called functional distortion) and towards social groups (distributive distortion). Since then, however, profound transformations have affected both the institutional architecture and the distributive profile of the Italian welfare state. Through an in-depth reconstruction of three decades of welfare reforms in Italy, this article shows how retrenchment and regulatory reforms in pension and labour market policies in an earlier phase (1992–2015), combined with the rather unexpected ‘expansionary turn’ in family and anti-poverty policies in more recent times (2016–2022), have partly reduced the comparative imbalances of the Italian welfare state, making it less of an outlier than in previous decades. To understand such puzzling developments, it relies on an explanatory framework centred on the interplay between socio-political demand and political supply, showing how the emergence of new coalitions, which for the first time mobilized latent social needs, combined with the reshuffling of the party system and the electoral success of parties challenging the austerity paradigm, quite unexpectedly contributed to make the Italian welfare state now look more ‘mainstream’ than in the past.

Leaders decide to engage diplomatically with their foreign peers for various reasons but, given their limited time and resources, they have to choose which peers to prioritize. As such, the study of international diplomatic visits helps shed light on a government's foreign policy approach and better understand its priorities in how it conceives and builds foreign relations. While the literature on diplomatic engagements has largely debated its drivers and effects, the role of domestic influences, in particular of party politics, has remained understudied. We address this gap and investigate the party politics of diplomatic engagements leveraging a new dataset on Italy's high-level international bilateral diplomatic visits in 2000–2023. Our findings show that partisan differences influence not only the overall frequency of such engagements, following curvilinear left–right patterns, but also the political regimes that left- and right-wing governments prioritize in such endeavours, exposing the lower importance right-wing parties assign to democratic principles when managing their countries' foreign relations, as these governments are systematically more likely to interact with authoritarian regimes than with democracies.

This study examines the amendatory activities of the majority and opposition parties in the Italian 18th legislature (2018–2022) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Following the rally around the flag hypothesis, we test whether both sides exhibited similar legislative behaviour during emergencies. We exploit an original database covering amendments tabled by Italian legislators on bills converting decree-laws. Results reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic affected amendment activities without aligning majority and opposition behaviours. In other words, the opposition did not pull in the same direction of the government legislation. This can be explained by contingent factors and pre-existing party polarization.

This article analyses modes of policymaking related to asylum-seekers' reception in Italy and other European Union (EU) countries during the decade of the so-called 2015 asylum crisis. It shows that, while most EU countries experienced shifts towards more hierarchical modes of policymaking on asylum, Italy pursued a unique experience of multilevel governance (MLG) between 2014 and 2016, which was then dismantled in 2017. By looking at this MLG experience as a ‘heuristic case’, the article contributes to an ongoing debate about the drivers of MLG as a mode of policymaking. The existing literature suggests that MLG modes of policymaking are driven by institutional and structural factors or pressure by subnational and supranational actors for more participatory policymaking processes. Complementing and challenging these theoretical explanations we generate some hypotheses about additional factors that drive the emergence and dismantling of MLG. First, we argue that both supranational actors and subnational authorities, typically considered to be agents promoting MLG, can also advocate for more hierarchical modes of policymaking. Second, we argue that a fundamental prerequisite for MLG to emerge or persist is an overall convergence of political priorities and goals among the actors involved in multilevel policymaking. Both the kind of pressures made by supranational and subnational actors and actors' political priorities can be decisively shaped by dynamics of multilevel party politics. These findings are derived from analyses of 147 interviews with key actors involved in Italian asylum policymaking in the 2010s.

Before 2000, the UK operated one of the most liberal political finance regimes of any established democracy. Parties were highly dependent on private financing, state funding was minimal, limited transparency requirements existed with respect to party income or expenditure, and no limits applied to national election spending. Far-reaching reforms introduced by Labour in 2000 changed this regulatory environment radically, establishing donation disclosure requirements and capping election spending. However, Labour's reforms did not include significant increases in state funding, leaving the UK as a continued outlier in Western Europe in assuming political parties should predominantly be funded through private means. In this paper, we show how the Conservatives ultimately prospered under Labour's reforms, enabling them to greatly outspend Labour at four general elections from 2010 to 2019. Using the public registers created by Labour's reforms, we document how the party's financial re-stabilisation while in opposition was assisted to a surprising degree by state funding and how the party's donor base has shifted towards wealthy individuals and privately owned companies since its return to government in 2010. We conclude with a number of observations about how the apparently exceptional UK case can help generate important insights for the comparative study of political finance.

The datasets on the Italian political class provides two sets of information: (a) census data on a broad spectrum of individual-level variables on elected politicians, offering an updated mapping of the characteristics of more than 20,000 Italian representatives at all governmental levels; (b) survey data on politicians' attitudes towards elections, participation, public opinion, several national and international policy issues, and their views of political representation. Between September 2020 and January 2021, 2134 elected politicians at the local (n = 1917), regional (n = 128), national (n = 75) and European (n = 14) levels were interviewed, making this one of the largest surveys of the Italian political elites ever conducted and a valuable resource for researchers interested in the study of democratic representation.

Regional cabinet members (RCMs) are key political actors in subnational politics, especially in federal systems or in countries that have undergone a process of regionalization or devolution, even though they are still less studied than federal or national ministers. Italy and its regionalization process represent an interesting case study to understand how and under what conditions members of regional cabinets can exit from politics or move upwards, or downwards the different tiers of government. By using an original dataset of 721 RCMs in ordinary statute regions we tested through multinomial regression analysis whether political and institutional or personal factors influence their movements (both legislative or executive) upward, that is, toward national and/or European positions, backward toward local (both provincial or municipal) positions or their exit from politics. Our results show that both political–institutional and individual factors matter. In particular, displaying a previous national career favors upward movements while being a technician or independent favors the exit from politics.

After 78 years of democracy, Italy continues to grapple with its recent past in the political, social, and cultural spheres. Its experience of fascism under Mussolini, its dual participation in the Second World War, and the continuous and still existent connections between the ideological factions of the 1930s–1940s and now render the country a rich case for the study of public history and memory. The specificity of these characteristics has often made Italian history and memory look like an outlier, shaped by circumstances difficult to compare with those of other countries'. This paper argues that contemporary Italian memory politics are in reality a valuable source of information about the kind of mnemonic discourses that may arise in other (Western) European countries, given the increasingly polarised and populist European landscape. Our study of discourses put forwarded by the post-fascist party Fratelli d'Italia reveals a set of mnemonic tools with which they successfully banalise fascism and chip at Italian public discourse slowly but surely. The comparison between this discourse and that of VOX and AfD in Spain and Germany, respectively, shows that these tools, ranging from nativism to policy (de)legitimation linked to fascist imagery, has started to transfer to other countries' political strategies.

This article presents a longitudinal comparative analysis of the regulation of private funding to political parties in 15 West European democracies and explores how these rules have changed under the most recent wave of political finance reforms. In particular, the article questions whether a deregulation of political finance regulation may be in sight, with a downsizing of the role of the state in the political finance domain. While evidence does not support a clear movement toward deregulation, the article shows that the move from private to public subsidization may not be that irreversible as it seemed and that private funding to political parties is likely to become more prominent in the near future also in Europe.

This article aims to explain the deviant German case of an early and comprehensive regulation of party donations (combining a high level of transparency and incentives for small donations). Given the limited explanatory power of economic and institutional factors, the article emphasises the causal role of ideas for a policy stabilisation which occurred after 1993. A process-tracing analysis suggests that the 1983–1993 reform period was characterised by a conflict of ideas. During this conflict, ideas regarding undisclosed donations as an anti-democratic interference with democratic political competition came to prevail over ideas regarding all donations as a necessary condition for democratic competition irrespective of their regulation. The key actors in this conflict were, on the one hand, the new Green party which resuscitated the idea of donations being potentially anti-democratic and, on the other hand, the Constitutional Court which ultimately endorsed this ideational legacy promoted by the Greens. After 1993, donations in Germany came to be accepted as a necessary evil whose anti-democratic potential had to be limited by transparency obligations and incentives for small donations. The findings presented here suggest that policymakers need to link attempts to regulate party donations to ideational legacies (if available) to successfully tackle political corruption.