How do economic recessions affect European citizens’ attitudes towards environmental policies? In this article we investigate the attitudes of European citizens towards environmental protection considering its importance both at individual and country levels and adopting a longitudinal view. In light of the existing research on the link between pro-environmental attitudes and economic affluence of societies, including Ronald Inglehart’s theory of post-materialism, we hypothesise that levels of economic well-being as well as trust in political institutions are important drivers of Europeans’ attitudes towards environmental protection. Taking into consideration some macroeconomic indicators and the environmental attitude of public opinion, our main results show that even in time of crises, citizens’ pro-environmental attitudes persist in terms of importance, both at country and individual levels.

The practice of sharing products, services, and other activities among people living in the same city has emerged as one of the most important waves of social innovation in recent years. However, the public and scientific debate have, to date, been mostly rhetoric and rarely relied on empirical evidence. A study of the role played by local institutions in governing the phenomenon is still lacking. This paper addresses the issue of the relationship between local governments and private actors in the sharing economy sector, exploiting the ‘political exchange’ approach. Departing from this governance perspective, it appraises the political exchange – and its outputs in terms of co-operation – underlying the governing structures in two Italian cases between 2014 and 2018. We thus bridge the gap between a theoretical understanding of the sharing economy and empirical cases, providing scholars with a framework to study this phenomenon which highlights the crucial impact of the political investment of public institutions.

In many post-communist countries, the concept of patriotism is used instrumentally in populist discourses. It is rarely the subject of a substantive public debate, in which symbolic elites would be able to openly discuss and negotiate the scope of its meaning in front of an interested audience. A long-term plan to shape constructive civil attitudes gives way to the pressure of being effective in current politics. The author proposes to look at the category of patriotism in a socially useful way and to treat it as an important factor in the process of building a civil society. The young generation can play a significant role in this process. Poland seems to be an interesting case for the analysis of this research problem. This paper has two objectives. The descriptive objective is to present the author's research data on a sense and understanding of patriotism among Polish students. Its aim is to describe the prevailing pattern of patriotic attitudes and ideas about patriotism as shared by students. The explanatory objective of this paper is to answer the question about the constructive potential of patriotism: whether and to what extent it is an important determinant of civic activity. The results obtained should lead to practical conclusions that may be useful for various social institutions which are interested in releasing the positive energy of citizens and orienting them to functional goals, that is, the education system, as well as for political institutions that design and implement elements of the so-called youth policy.

This article analyzes the politicization of European integration in Italy. Has the euro crisis catalyzed a new electoral supply, which may have been matched by voters’ responses? After the crisis, Italian parties have increased their entrepreneurial efforts to prime EU issues into the political debate, trying to win over votes. This pattern may have led to a full politicization of European integration. To study the transformations in party strategies and voting behavior, I analyze the fluctuations in EU issue entrepreneurship and EU issue voting between 2009 and 2014. The findings reveal mixed results: parties have actually developed new strategies on EU issues, but without significantly changing voter preferences along the pro/anti-European dimension.

In the Southern Mediterranean region, the European Union (EU) supports the establishment of rule of law, pressuring for both the adoption of institutional guarantees of judicial independence and the enhancement of court administration capabilities. Drawing on a set of interviews with key EU and domestic actors, this study compares Morocco and Jordan, examining changes adopted at the institutional and administrative level since the ‘Arab Spring’ broke out. The findings show that external incentives for change penetrated only the administrative level of domestic judicial systems, while a path-dependent effect persisted at the institutional level. The evidence confirms the thesis that in areas of low politics even a mere normative pressure is able to drive rule adoption, whereas in more sensitive policy areas, as in the case of institutional judicial guarantees, the higher costs of adaptation make veto players resistant to external influences for change.

This paper seeks to develop a new typology of revisionism based on the nature of the aims (territorial/normative/hierarchy of prestige), the means employed (peaceful/violent), and the level of action (regional/global). This will then be used to explain the escalation of Russia's foreign policy from regional to global claims with reference to its military interventions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria and to identify the type of revisionism involved in each of the three Russian military interventions undertaken both inside (Georgia and Ukraine) and outside (Syria) the post-soviet space. The paper is divided into three parts. The first examines the concept of revisionism and suggests a new classification of six types in relation to the means, nature, and level of the claims put forward by revisionist powers. The second discusses the interventions carried out by Russia within its regional area (in Georgia and Ukraine). The third analyses the intervention in Syria and highlights the escalation of Russian claims from the regional to the global level.

The relationships between the State and political parties have often been analysed in dual terms. Yet, as Katz and Mair already noticed in their well-known (and criticized) article on the emergence of the cartel party, a clear separation between parties and public institutions has never been completely achieved, in the evolution of liberal democracies. In contrast, while parties act as agencies of institutionalization, public institutions recognize (de jure or de facto) parties as the legitimate actors of political representation. From this perspective, it is worth considering party change as a process intertwined also with institutional change. To date, however, the analysis of such a relationship has been neglected by political scientists, who have privileged explanations of party change based on other factors, whether at systemic or at a micro level. By avoiding a priori assumptions about causality, our main research question is the following: is it possible to identify patterns of co-evolution between State institutions – more specifically, public administration – and party organizations? Building on a new institutional approach to organization theory, the aim of this article is to investigate to what extent the evolution in the size of party organizations and in the size of public administration has followed similar trajectories. Our study focuses on the United Kingdom and Italy, from 1950 to 2010. Our findings confirm that parties' external face expands when public spending and the number of public employees increase, and vice-versa. The same holds for parties' internal face, at least in the Italian case.

Democratic politics does not meet the expectations of citizens who have gradually become more critical towards representative politics and the political elite that represent them. From these well-known considerations and social evaluation spread among the citizenry, this paper focuses on political representation and the concept of citizenship in the age of the Internet. After discussing the positive and negative aspects of digital disintermediation (and hence neo-intermediation), this study concentrates on the potentialities of the role of the Internet, with its ambiguities, and monitoring of citizens' engagement as a possible safety-net for representative democracies in crisis worldwide.