Luigi Curini
Biographic Data
| ID | 277142 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Luigi Curini |
| GIVEN NAMES | Luigi |
| FAMILY NAME | Curini |
| SIGNATURE | CURINI L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Milan |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1974-9815 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 625 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Assessing public sphere influence on political attitudes across generations: A mixed-methods study of generational political structuring in Italy
We present a project investigating the impact of social media on ideological structuring of political attitudes in a generational perspective, with Italy (around the 2024 European Parliament elections) as a case study. We introduce an innovative mixed-methods, sequential, quantitative-driven, multi-stage design combining surveys, qualitative interviews, and social media data, which effectively integrates qualitative and quantitative components to…
Spatial contagion and party competition on environmental issue salience
I trust you, but I'm scared!” Attitudinal and emotional drivers of support for restrictive interventions during crises
Under what conditions do citizens support restrictive and punitive measures to curb global crises? This article investigates the role of political trust in supporting different interventions across three types of crises—pandemics, climate change, and terrorism—both directly and in conjunction with issue‐related anxiety. We test the hypothesis that political trust positively affects the likelihood of accepting restrictive measures during crisis, f…
Decision-Making in the Dark: The Asymmetric Spread of Covid-19 Policies
We investigate the diffusion of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions across OECD countries from January 2020 to March 2022 using spatial econometric methods on daily data about policy stringency and epidemic evolution. During the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers needed to make crucial decisions in a low-information environment: in such a context, the incentives to mimic the behavior of others can be quite strong. We empirically document a systematic l…
Sexism and Media Communication. An Application to the Italian Case
Acknowledging the importance of focusing on media’s communication for studying linguistic sexism, we propose a new method to analyze a corpus of texts via a machine learning approach built around an original training-set. We seek to establish a framework of the current use of talking about women in newspapers that expands beyond merely the objective forms of discrimination by also measuring the degree to which it implicitly conveys sexist message…
The Colors of the Populist Radical Right: The Strategic Use of Hue and Saturation in Party Logos
Populist radical right (PRR) parties tend to stress their differences from other parties. Yet at the same time, PRR parties have increasingly sought to integrate into party systems across the globe. In seeking to understand the way that PRR parties negotiate this paradoxical situation, the literature tends to focus on their policy offerings or discourse. We, on the contrary, investigate an underestimated aspect of their political communication: t…
The Gender Gap in Issue Attention and Language Use within a Legislative Setting: An Application to the Italian Parliament (1948–2020)
We investigate the gender gap in issue attention among members of parliament (MPs) by applying automated text analytic techniques to a novel data set on Italian parliamentary speeches over a remarkably long period (1948–2020). We detect a gendered specialization across issues that tends to disappear as women’s shares in parliamentary groups increase. We then investigate whether women’s access to previously male-owned issues brings with it a diffe…
Who looks up to the Leviathan? Ideology, political trust, and support for restrictive state interventions in times of crisis
The extent in which voters from different ideological viewpoints support state interventions to curb crises remains an outstanding conundrum, marred by conflicting evidence. In this article, we test two possible ways out from such puzzle. The role of ideology to explain support for state interventions, we argue, could be (i) conditional upon the ideological nature of the crisis itself (e.g., whether the crisis relates to conservation vs. post-mat…
Populism in the eye of the beholder? A conjoint experiment on citizens’ identification of populists
Despite decades of research on the nature and characteristics of populism, and on how political actors interpret populist attitudes, the study of how the public identify populist politicians remains a largely unexplored topic. Is populism in the eye of the beholder? What causes voters to perceive a political actor as populist? Is there any systematic heterogeneity in the evaluation of candidates among citizens according to their individual charac…
It's the ideology, stupid!”: Trust in the press, ideological proximity between citizens and journalists and political parallelism. A comparative approach in 17 countries
Matching national surveys with the dataset offered by the Worlds of Journalism Study network (2012–2016), this article presents an analysis of trust in the press covering 16 European countries and the United States. Drawing from the spatial proximity model of voter utility, this article focuses on the ideological proximity between journalists’ and citizens’ left-right positions as a determinant of trust in the press. We expect a positive relation…
The colors of ideology: Chromatic isomorphism and political party logos
Despite growing attention to electoral brands, political scientists have largely remained “color blind,” neglecting parties’ chromatic choices. Moreover, scholars dedicated limited attention to how party organizations converge on the use of similar structures and communication strategies, thereby engaging in a process of institutional isomorphism. We seek to simultaneously fill both gaps by examining the logos of more than 300 parties in 35 democ…
Discussing the Islamic State on Twitter
When the Worlds of Preferences Collide: Determinants of MP’s Attitudes on the Italian Questione Romana 1861–1870
The relationship between original and induced preferences in affecting political actions has been a recurrent topic in the literature. Less attention has been devoted to investigating the interaction between these two preferences, and possible neutralising/reinforcing effects. We explore this dynamic on a crucial issue in XIX century Italy, the ‘Questione Romana’, employing a quantitative analysis on an original corpus of legislative speeches (18…
Short-Term Issue Emphasis on Twitter During the 2017 German Election: A Comparison of the Economic Left-Right and Socio-Cultural Dimensions
First published online: 04 November 2020
Committed Moderates and Uncommitted Extremists: Ideological Leaning and Parties’ Narratives on Military Interventions in Italy
Current research highlights that ideology decisively affects political contestation concerning peace and security operations in European countries. In particular, recent studies suggest that party preferences on this issue follow a curvilinear distribution along the left-right axis, delineating a conflict between moderate and extreme parties. However, the impact of this cleavage on the use of strategic narratives to either support or criticize th…
The integrity of the 2016 US Presidential Election: Exploring the possible impact of ideology on experts’ judgments
Using new comparative expert data about the 2016 US Presidential Election, this article explores the effects of experts’ ideological preferences on their evaluations of electoral integrity. Without contesting the claim that the 2016 election faced challenges of integrity, our analyses reveal a substantial association between negative evaluation of election integrity and experts’ ideological orientation. Our results also suggest that this ideologi…
Capturing causation in political science: The Perspective of Research Design
In the last decades, ‘research design’ has become a strategic topic across political science. An emerging discourse relies on it to encompass paradigmatic oppositions and cultivate a pluralist approach to causation. As an introduction to the special issue on the topic, we offer an outline of the roles that the discipline recognizes to design in its relation to models and contend that, in a time of fascination for predictors, political science plu…
The Sage Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science and International Relations
What You Seek Is Who You Are: An Applied Spatial Model of Newspapers’ Ideological Slant
In recent years, the news media landscape has been characterized by two distinct patterns: a decline in newspaper circulation, and a persistent degree of ideological slant in newspapers’ position. We explore a possible nexus between these two phenomena by means of a model that extends some recent developments in the empirical spatial theory of voting to the reader’s choice with respect to newspapers. We assume that ideological proximity to a news…
Proximity Between Citizens and Journalists as a Determinant of Trust in the Media. An Application to Italy
This study presents an analysis of trust in types of media with an application to the Italian context. In particular, we focus on the role played by the ideological proximity between journalists’ and citizens’ political leanings while differentiating between traditional (press and TV) and new (internet and social networks) media. To do so, we assume, within the Hierarchy of Influences Model, that the individual level is increasingly influent in s…
The spatial determinants of the prevalence of anti-elite rhetoric across parties
The article investigates whether there are specific spatial conditions that make a party more likely to pay closer attention to anti-elite rhetoric than to alternative issues in its political confrontation with other parties. The article first treats anti-elitism as a non-policy vote-winning strategy that could be valued positively by a broad class of voters across ideological lines (its ‘quasi-valence’ attribute). It is then shown that the incen…
The Intensity of Government–Opposition Divide as Measured through Legislative Speeches and What We Can Learn from It: Analyses of Japanese Parliamentary Debates, 1953–2013 – Erratum
The Intensity of Government–Opposition Divide as Measured through Legislative Speeches and What We Can Learn from It: Analyses of Japanese Parliamentary Debates, 1953–2013
Through the analysis of legislative speeches made by prime ministers and party representatives in parliamentary sessions in Japan from 1953 to 2013, we argue that it is possible to place parties according to a dimension that captures their confrontational nature within a parliamentary democracy and its evolution over time. Using this dimension extracted via a well-known scaling algorithm (Wordfish), we develop an index of the intensity of the gov…
Isis at Its Apogee: The Arabic Discourse on Twitter and What We Can Learn From That About Isis Support and Foreign Fighters
We analyze 26.2 million comments published in Arabic language on Twitter, from July 2014 to January 2015, when Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)’s strength reached its peak and the group was prominently expanding the territorial area under its control. By doing that, we are able to measure the share of support and aversion toward the Islamic State within the online Arab communities. We then investigate two specific topics. First, by exploiti…
Commenting on Political Topics Through Twitter: Is European Politics European
The aim of this study was to explore social media, and specifically Twitter’s potential to generate a European demos. Our use of data derived from social media complements the traditional use of mass media and survey data within existing studies. We selected two Twitter hashtags of European relevance, # schengen and # ttip, to test several theories on a European demos (non-demos, European democracy, or pan-European demos) and to determine which o…
Satisfaction with Democracy and the Winner/Loser Debate: The Role of Policy Preferences and Past Experience
Previous authors have found greater political support among electoral winners than losers, but they define winners and losers at a single time point, and employ a dichotomous categorization that neglects possible variations within each group. This study considers both the past history of winning or losing and the impact of ideological distance from the government on a political support indicator – satisfaction with democracy. Using a multilevel m…
Every tweet counts? How sentiment analysis of social media can improve our knowledge of citizens’ political preferences with an application to Italy and France
The growing usage of social media by a wider audience of citizens sharply increases the possibility of investigating the web as a device to explore and track political preferences. In the present paper we apply a method recently proposed by other social scientists to three different scenarios, by analyzing on one side the online popularity of Italian political leaders throughout 2011, and on the other the voting intention of French Internet users…
Missing Links in Party-System Polarization: How Institutions and Voters Matter
This article aims to understand the determinants of party-system polarization by moving beyond the (almost exclusive) emphasis placed in the literature on the role of the electoral system and the number of parties. We propose a larger menu of explanatory variables that includes both institutional and voters-related factors. Regarding the institutional factors, we highlight the consequences of expectations of coalition formations as well as office…
Experts’ Political Preferences and Their Impact on Ideological Bias: An Unfolding Analysis based on a Benoit-Laver Expert Survey
Expert surveys have become increasingly popular among political scientists. One of the problems of using surveys (of any sort) to estimate party positions is that respondents can be influenced by their subjective political views. As a consequence, experts may give biased responses, and such (ideological) bias may affect certain parties more than others. In this paper, we use the latest expert survey of Benoit and Laver (2006) to unfold the ideal …
Government survival the Italian way: The core and the advantages of policy immobilism during the First Republic
During its nearly fifty years of history, the First Italian Republic has been characterised by the highest rate of cabinet turnover in Western Europe. There are several convincing explanations for this exceptional feature; nevertheless, merely looking at the average figure risks overlooking the variety in the Italian government experience. Focusing on the spatial determinants of Italian cabinet duration shows that the presence of a core party has…
Using Sentiment Analysis to Monitor Electoral Campaigns: Method Matters—Evidence From the United States and Italy
In recent years, there has been an increasing attention in the literature on the possibility of analyzing social media as a useful complement to traditional off-line polls to monitor an electoral campaign. Some scholars claim that by doing so, we can also produce a forecast of the result. Relying on a proper methodology for sentiment analysis remains a crucial issue in this respect. In this work, we apply the supervised method proposed by Hopkins…
Ideological proximity and valence competition. Negative campaigning through allegation of corruption in the Italian legislative arena from 1946 to 1994
The conditional impact of winner/loser status and ideological proximity on citizen participation
Many scholars have investigated the relationship between ideological orientations and mass participation, and there is also a growing number of studies comparing political attitudes and behaviour between electoral winners and losers. This article seeks to bring together these two strands of literature with respect to political participation, focusing on the interaction between citizens’ winner/loser status and ideological distance from their gove…
The Conditional Ideological Inducement to Campaign on Character Valence Issues in Multiparty Systems: The Case of Corruption
Acknowledging the role played by character valence issues in affecting parties’ fortunes, several recent papers have investigated the possible intentional use of such issues in electoral contests. A corollary of this line of research has focused on identifying conditions under which parties are expected to invest more in valence campaigning. In this article, we focus on the role played by parties’ relative ideological positions in a multiparty se…
Government Alternation and Legislative Party Unity: The Case of Italy, 1988–2008
The large literature on legislative party unity identifies the confidence relationship, i.e. the threat of being voted out of office and losing agenda setting powers, as well as cabinet membership, as two crucial institutional sources of party discipline. However, by focusing on the dramatic change in the Italian political system following the 1994 election, the article shows that the impact of these factors on party unity (and the direction of t…
First- and second-level agenda setting in the Twittersphere: An application to the Italian political debate
The rise of social network sites reopened the debate on the ability of traditional media to influence public opinion and act as an agenda setter. To answer this question, the present paper investigates first-level and second-level agenda-setting effects in the online environment by focusing on two heated Italian political debates (the reform of public funding of parties and the debate over austerity). By employing innovative and efficient statist…
A case of valence competition in elections: Parties’ emphasis on corruption in electoral manifestos
Despite a growing interest in investigating the causes of political corruption, far less attention has been devoted to analysing the conditions under which political actors have an incentive to highlight corruption in electoral competition. Do parties talk about corruption just as a reaction to exogenous factors (i.e. scandals reported in the press)? Or are there systematic patterns in the way parties emphasize this issue during campaigns? Assumi…
The Colors of the Populist Radical Right: The Strategic Use of Hue and Saturation in Party Logos
Populist radical right (PRR) parties tend to stress their differences from other parties. Yet at the same time, PRR parties have increasingly sought to integrate into party systems across the globe. In seeking to understand the way that PRR parties negotiate this paradoxical situation, the literature tends to focus on their policy offerings or discourse. We, on the contrary, investigate an underestimated aspect of their political communication: t…
The Intensity of Government–Opposition Divide as Measured through Legislative Speeches and What We Can Learn from It: Analyses of Japanese Parliamentary Debates, 1953–2013
Through the analysis of legislative speeches made by prime ministers and party representatives in parliamentary sessions in Japan from 1953 to 2013, we argue that it is possible to place parties according to a dimension that captures their confrontational nature within a parliamentary democracy and its evolution over time. Using this dimension extracted via a well-known scaling algorithm (Wordfish), we develop an index of the intensity of the gov…
Isis and heritage destruction: A Sentiment Analysis
While periods of war have always seen cultural heritage placed at risk, the recent rise of ISIS has involved the deliberate targeting of heritage sites as part of a broader strategy towards local communities in Syria and Iraq. Using data collated from social media (Twitter), the authors conducted sentiment analysis of reactions to instances of heritage destruction and repurposing in the Middle East between 2015 and 2016. It is hoped that the insi…
The spatial determinants of the prevalence of anti-elite rhetoric across parties
The article investigates whether there are specific spatial conditions that make a party more likely to pay closer attention to anti-elite rhetoric than to alternative issues in its political confrontation with other parties. The article first treats anti-elitism as a non-policy vote-winning strategy that could be valued positively by a broad class of voters across ideological lines (its ‘quasi-valence’ attribute). It is then shown that the incen…
Government formation under the shadow of a core party: The case of the First Italian Republic
Despite its theoretical relevance, the role played by the existence of a core party in explaining the partisan composition of governments represents an understudied area in the empirical research on coalition formations. This article addresses the gap in the literature by focusing on the Italian case between 1946–1993. The role of the core party not only finds corroboration in the data, but it also clarifies the role played by political inertia. …
Short-Term Issue Emphasis on Twitter During the 2017 German Election: A Comparison of the Economic Left-Right and Socio-Cultural Dimensions
First published online: 04 November 2020
Intra-party politics and interest groups: Missing links in explaining government effectiveness
E-Campaigning in the 2014 European elections: The emphasis on valence issues in a two-dimensional multiparty system
The article explores the relationship between the incentives of parties to campaign on valence issues and the ideological proximity between one party and its competitors. Building from the existing literature, we provide a novel theoretical model that investigates this relationship in a two-dimensional multiparty system. Our theoretical argument is then tested focusing on the 2014 European electoral campaign in the five largest European countries…
Negative Campaigning in No-Cabinet Alternation Systems: Ideological Closeness and Blames of Corruption in Italy and Japan Using Party Manifesto Data
Within a one-dimensional spatial framework, we deduce that parties’ incentives ‘to go negative’, by blaming alleged insufficiencies of the rival concerning commonly shared values, increase with their ideological proximity. We test our hypothesis by considering the long period of no-cabinet alternation that characterized both Italy and Japan. In particular, we focus on the (spatial) incentives of the Italian Communist Party and of the Japanese Soc…
The colors of ideology: Chromatic isomorphism and political party logos
Despite growing attention to electoral brands, political scientists have largely remained “color blind,” neglecting parties’ chromatic choices. Moreover, scholars dedicated limited attention to how party organizations converge on the use of similar structures and communication strategies, thereby engaging in a process of institutional isomorphism. We seek to simultaneously fill both gaps by examining the logos of more than 300 parties in 35 democ…
More than post-election cabinets: Uncertainty and the “magnitude of change” during Italian government bargaining
The existence of political uncertainty has been identified in the literature as one of the main determinants of cabinet bargaining delays. Still, practically all studies on the topic expect uncertainty to play a relevant role only during the immediate post-election period, ignoring the variety of different government experiences, especially in countries characterized by a high cabinet turnover in the between-elections period, such as Italy. To ov…
Populism in the eye of the beholder? A conjoint experiment on citizens’ identification of populists
Despite decades of research on the nature and characteristics of populism, and on how political actors interpret populist attitudes, the study of how the public identify populist politicians remains a largely unexplored topic. Is populism in the eye of the beholder? What causes voters to perceive a political actor as populist? Is there any systematic heterogeneity in the evaluation of candidates among citizens according to their individual charac…
Proximity Between Citizens and Journalists as a Determinant of Trust in the Media. An Application to Italy
This study presents an analysis of trust in types of media with an application to the Italian context. In particular, we focus on the role played by the ideological proximity between journalists’ and citizens’ political leanings while differentiating between traditional (press and TV) and new (internet and social networks) media. To do so, we assume, within the Hierarchy of Influences Model, that the individual level is increasingly influent in s…
Capitale Sociale, Azione Collettiva E Rendimento Istituzionale: Il Caso Di Un Programma Di Microfinanza
IntroduzioneL'importanza dei problemi legati all'azione collettiva — e più in generale alla cooperazione — per lo studio della politica non può essere trascurata. In effetti, è difficile trovare un'area della vita sociale in cui siano assenti. Alcuni di questi problemi trovano delle soluzioni; molti altri no. A questo riguardo, si è spesso fatto uso del dilemma del prigioniero, in cui la defezione domina indipendentemente dalle decisioni attese d…
Experts’ Political Preferences and Their Impact on Ideological Bias: An Unfolding Analysis based on a Benoit-Laver Expert Survey
Expert surveys have become increasingly popular among political scientists. One of the problems of using surveys (of any sort) to estimate party positions is that respondents can be influenced by their subjective political views. As a consequence, experts may give biased responses, and such (ideological) bias may affect certain parties more than others. In this paper, we use the latest expert survey of Benoit and Laver (2006) to unfold the ideal …
Ideological proximity and valence competition. Negative campaigning through allegation of corruption in the Italian legislative arena from 1946 to 1994
Negative Campaigning in No-Cabinet Alternation Systems: Ideological Closeness and Blames of Corruption in Italy and Japan Using Party Manifesto Data
Within a one-dimensional spatial framework, we deduce that parties’ incentives ‘to go negative’, by blaming alleged insufficiencies of the rival concerning commonly shared values, increase with their ideological proximity. We test our hypothesis by considering the long period of no-cabinet alternation that characterized both Italy and Japan. In particular, we focus on the (spatial) incentives of the Italian Communist Party and of the Japanese Soc…
Government survival the Italian way: The core and the advantages of policy immobilism during the First Republic
During its nearly fifty years of history, the First Italian Republic has been characterised by the highest rate of cabinet turnover in Western Europe. There are several convincing explanations for this exceptional feature; nevertheless, merely looking at the average figure risks overlooking the variety in the Italian government experience. Focusing on the spatial determinants of Italian cabinet duration shows that the presence of a core party has…
Government Alternation and Legislative Party Unity: The Case of Italy, 1988–2008
The large literature on legislative party unity identifies the confidence relationship, i.e. the threat of being voted out of office and losing agenda setting powers, as well as cabinet membership, as two crucial institutional sources of party discipline. However, by focusing on the dramatic change in the Italian political system following the 1994 election, the article shows that the impact of these factors on party unity (and the direction of t…
Missing Links in Party-System Polarization: How Institutions and Voters Matter
This article aims to understand the determinants of party-system polarization by moving beyond the (almost exclusive) emphasis placed in the literature on the role of the electoral system and the number of parties. We propose a larger menu of explanatory variables that includes both institutional and voters-related factors. Regarding the institutional factors, we highlight the consequences of expectations of coalition formations as well as office…
Satisfaction with Democracy and the Winner/Loser Debate: The Role of Policy Preferences and Past Experience
Previous authors have found greater political support among electoral winners than losers, but they define winners and losers at a single time point, and employ a dichotomous categorization that neglects possible variations within each group. This study considers both the past history of winning or losing and the impact of ideological distance from the government on a political support indicator – satisfaction with democracy. Using a multilevel m…
Every tweet counts? How sentiment analysis of social media can improve our knowledge of citizens’ political preferences with an application to Italy and France
The growing usage of social media by a wider audience of citizens sharply increases the possibility of investigating the web as a device to explore and track political preferences. In the present paper we apply a method recently proposed by other social scientists to three different scenarios, by analyzing on one side the online popularity of Italian political leaders throughout 2011, and on the other the voting intention of French Internet users…
Government formation under the shadow of a core party: The case of the First Italian Republic
Despite its theoretical relevance, the role played by the existence of a core party in explaining the partisan composition of governments represents an understudied area in the empirical research on coalition formations. This article addresses the gap in the literature by focusing on the Italian case between 1946–1993. The role of the core party not only finds corroboration in the data, but it also clarifies the role played by political inertia. …
Parties' Influence during Government Policy Negotiations: Parliamentary Dynamics and Spatial Advantages in the First Italian Republic
As long as parties are interested in policies, they will always have incentives for influencing the cabinet bargaining process, although they do not necessarily shape its outcome to the same extent. Being a member of the invested government, for example, should increase the leverage a party enjoys when bargaining over the cabinet programme. Nevertheless, depending on institutional and political conditions, non-cabinet parties may also play a role…
Social Media e Sentiment Analysis: L'evoluzione Dei Fenomeni Sociali Attraverso la Rete
Due miliardi e mezzo di utenti internet, oltre un miliardo di account Facebook, 550 milioni di profili Twitter. Che parlano, discutono, si confrontano sui temi più svariati. Un flusso in continuo divenire di informazioni che dà sostanza ogni giorno al mondo dei Big Data. Ma come si analizza concretamente il “sentiment” della Rete? Quali sono i pregi e i limiti dei diversi metodi esistenti? E a quali domande possiamo dare una risposta? Dopo aver p…
Using Sentiment Analysis to Monitor Electoral Campaigns: Method Matters—Evidence From the United States and Italy
In recent years, there has been an increasing attention in the literature on the possibility of analyzing social media as a useful complement to traditional off-line polls to monitor an electoral campaign. Some scholars claim that by doing so, we can also produce a forecast of the result. Relying on a proper methodology for sentiment analysis remains a crucial issue in this respect. In this work, we apply the supervised method proposed by Hopkins…
How moderates and extremists find happiness: Ideological orientation, citizen–government proximity, and life satisfaction
While the topic of life satisfaction and its determinants has drawn increasing attention among political scientists, most studies have focused mainly on macro-level variables, and often overlooked the role of individuals’ attitudes vis-à-vis their governments. The present article attempts to fill this gap by examining whether citizens’ left–right self-placement and ideological distance from their governments exert an independent effect on life sa…
The institutional foundations of committee cohesion in a (changing) parliamentary democracy
The role played by legislative committees in parliamentary democracies is directly related to some of their properties. In particular cohesion, namely similarity of committee members’ preferences, is the most important non-institutional feature that influences committee working. This non-institutional aspect, on its turn, is directly affected by the institutional environment. In this paper we hypothesize that electoral rules, committee agenda set…
Explaining party ideological stances
Legislative Committees as Uncertainty Reduction Devices in Multiparty Parliamentary Democracies
Most research on committees in multiparty legislatures in parliamentary democracies focuses on their role in solving intra-cabinet delegation problems. Using a straightforward spatial model, this article discusses how committees can also solve uncertainty problems that arise in settings characterised by unstable coalitions, weak governmental agenda control and a lack of government change. In order to explore empirically how committees solve these…
An Italian Leitmotiv? Corruption and Competence in the Debates of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (1946–2014)
By making use of an original data-set built based on a codification of all investiture debates of the Italian governments from 1946 to 2014, the paper investigates the main factors that explain the choice of a party to devote its attention to the valence issues of corruption and competence in its legislative speeches. Two classes of hypotheses are tested; the first concentrates on spatial reasons, and the second concentrates on contextual factors…
A case of valence competition in elections: Parties’ emphasis on corruption in electoral manifestos
Despite a growing interest in investigating the causes of political corruption, far less attention has been devoted to analysing the conditions under which political actors have an incentive to highlight corruption in electoral competition. Do parties talk about corruption just as a reaction to exogenous factors (i.e. scandals reported in the press)? Or are there systematic patterns in the way parties emphasize this issue during campaigns? Assumi…
The Conditional Ideological Inducement to Campaign on Character Valence Issues in Multiparty Systems: The Case of Corruption
Acknowledging the role played by character valence issues in affecting parties’ fortunes, several recent papers have investigated the possible intentional use of such issues in electoral contests. A corollary of this line of research has focused on identifying conditions under which parties are expected to invest more in valence campaigning. In this article, we focus on the role played by parties’ relative ideological positions in a multiparty se…
Measuring Idiosyncratic Happiness Through the Analysis of Twitter: An Application to the Italian Case
First- and second-level agenda setting in the Twittersphere: An application to the Italian political debate
The rise of social network sites reopened the debate on the ability of traditional media to influence public opinion and act as an agenda setter. To answer this question, the present paper investigates first-level and second-level agenda-setting effects in the online environment by focusing on two heated Italian political debates (the reform of public funding of parties and the debate over austerity). By employing innovative and efficient statist…
More than post-election cabinets: Uncertainty and the “magnitude of change” during Italian government bargaining
The existence of political uncertainty has been identified in the literature as one of the main determinants of cabinet bargaining delays. Still, practically all studies on the topic expect uncertainty to play a relevant role only during the immediate post-election period, ignoring the variety of different government experiences, especially in countries characterized by a high cabinet turnover in the between-elections period, such as Italy. To ov…
The conditional impact of winner/loser status and ideological proximity on citizen participation
Many scholars have investigated the relationship between ideological orientations and mass participation, and there is also a growing number of studies comparing political attitudes and behaviour between electoral winners and losers. This article seeks to bring together these two strands of literature with respect to political participation, focusing on the interaction between citizens’ winner/loser status and ideological distance from their gove…
Corruption, Ideology, and Populism
Political science (46 works) · Politics (38 works) · Law (37 works) · Law (37 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (30 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Political economy (24 works) · Ideology (23 works) · Economics (22 works) · Computer Science (20 works)