Over the last decades, Western European party systems have experienced growing levels of electoral volatility and the recurring emergence of successful new parties. This evidence calls into question the issue of party system institutionalization (PSI), a topic taken for granted so far in Western Europe, following the conventional wisdom that party systems are highly institutionalized in this region. This article tackles this issue and provides some contributions: it offers a theoretical clarification of PSI and develops an index allowing for cross-country and cross-time comparability; it looks for an explanation, by testing the impact of various potential determinants and their changes over time. Covering 324 elections in 19 countries since 1945, the analysis shows that, since the 1970s, a process of de-institutionalization is going on and that PSI is mainly a function of the cleavage structure and the number of parties, with economic performance becoming relevant only in the last period.

The Five Star Movement (M5S) formed the Eurosceptic Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy Group when it first elected its members in the European Parliament (EP) in 2014. Two and a half years later, the M5S sought, without success, to leave the Eurosceptics and join the Liberal group. This attempted a change of transnational affiliation is puzzling: why has the M5S tried to leave the Eurosceptic group to ally with the most Europhile group in the EP? How could this U-turn be explained? Relying on several different data – the EUANDI party data set, official EP data, and original interviews with members of the EP – this article provides a systematic answer to these questions. We test three general hypotheses on group membership in the EP, using the M5S as a case study. We show that neither policy congruence nor the pursuit of office fully explains the M5S’s observed or attempted alliances. We suggest, instead, that ‘domestic politics’ is the key driver of the M5S’s behaviour in the EP. Political group membership is functional to the Movement’s strategic objectives at home. This article shows that national-level explanations of transnational affiliation need to be given more consideration, and highlights the ‘second-order’ importance of the EU arena with respect to ‘first-order’ national strategic objectives.

This paper focuses on the reasons that Italian interest groups decide to lobby together with like-minded groups (‘friends’), or engage in networking activity with groups that have conflicting interests (‘foes’), in order to influence public policy. How often do Italian interest groups recur to these lobbying strategies? What favours the construction of a coalition of more or less different interest groups lobbying on a particular issue? What, on the contrary, influences the decision to lobby individually? In order to answer these questions, original data coming from a national survey conducted on 1277 Italian interest groups are provided. Empirical results are interesting: from a descriptive point of view, business groups are more likely to engage in joint lobbying than other group types, whereas the same holds true for unions with respect to networking with rival organizations. From an explanatory point of view, groups that perceive themselves to be threatened by rivals’ influence in policymaking, or by environmental challenges, are more likely to work in coalitions and to engage in networking: resources do not matter in ‘absolute’ and ‘objective’ terms, but in ‘relative’ and ‘subjective’ ones.

The purpose of the article is try to assess whether inclusive procedures of selection are more likely to appoint a candidate who can be competitive in the general elections compared with less inclusive ones. Accordingly, I took into account nomination processes (NPs) to select/appoint the prime ministerial/presidential candidate for general elections held in four Western European countries (France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom) over approximately the last two decades. Using an original data source and innovative indicators, I assessed the inclusiveness of each NP and the party/candidate’s performance in the following general election in order to look for a possible relation. The outcome shows a very weak negative correlation between the two variables. Thus, while it does not appear that inclusive systems of selection have a clear positive impact at the electoral level, it is likewise hard to maintain that systems such as primary elections cause electoral failure.

After the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, the UN launched the peacekeeping operation UNIFIL II. Italy embarked on the demanding task of taking responsibility for leading the mission. We present a model of military intervention in multilateral operations that aims at highlighting the mechanisms at stake. In so doing, we argue that an analytical eclectic approach offers a novel explanation of Italy’s behaviour. We explain the drivers of Italy’s intervention in Lebanon in two ways. First, we analyse Italy’s actions at the outset of the crisis. Second, we provide an account of the parliamentary debate that took place in both chambers of the Italian Parliament between July and October 2006.

The article aims at disentangling the existing relation between job precariousness and political participation at the individual level illustrating that the former can be considered an emerging political cleavage. The authors apply an interpretive framework typical of political participation studies to an original data set composed of two groups of young workers (with precarious and open-ended contracts) in a big Italian post-industrial city, Turin. First, applying a confirmatory factor analysis, a typology of three ‘modes’ of political participation – voting, collective action, and political consumerism – is used to reduce data complexity. Second, logistic regressions are deployed to analyze the role played by occupational status, political positioning, and the interaction between the two, on the different modes of political participation. Precarious youth show a higher level of political participation in representational behaviours (voting). Left-wing youth are generally more active than non-left-wing ones in non-representational behaviours (collective actions and consumerism), the impact is more pronounced for precarious young people. Thus, results demonstrate the relevance of occupational status in explaining patterns of participation and invite scholars to promote a dialogue between industrial relations and political participation studies.