Enrico Borghetto
Biographic Data
| ID | 324470 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Enrico Borghetto |
| GIVEN NAMES | Enrico |
| FAMILY NAME | Borghetto |
| SIGNATURE | BORGHETTO E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Florence |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8676-3583 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 186 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
From sanctions to incentives: The impact of NextGenerationEU on the European Semester
Whereas the EU has been effective in designing ex ante conditionality for accession and Euro adoption, it has struggled to influence domestic reforms once membership is secured. Soft coordination instruments, notably the European Semester, have therefore been regarded as weak. In response to the Covid-19 crisis, NextGenerationEU (NGEU) introduced an incentive-based model of conditionality, moving beyond the Semester’s ineffective sanctions. Using…
Reform Agendas in National Recovery and Resilience Plans: Partisan Politics and Domestic Usages of Europe
This article examines the agency of national executives in shaping the reform agendas within the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) under the EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). Through a comparative analysis of NRRPs drafting in Germany, France, Italy and Spain, and an in‐depth longitudinal study of Italy, we argue that the partisan profile of national executives, to a significant extent, accounts for which reforms were incl…
Is the populist Robin Hood a fairy tale? Parliamentary attention to social welfare
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, populist parties rose to prominence across Europe, campaigning on the promise to do something about growing economic inequality by funding social welfare programs. We investigate if the pro-welfare reputation of European populist parties, either on the left or the right, is well deserved. We draw on a dataset of questions asked by members of parliament from nine European democracies over three decades. We …
Alignment and asymmetry: European and national crisis governance under the Recovery and Resilience Facility
The European Union (EU) and its member states are a paradigmatic case of governance at multiple levels, whose interpretation and resolution of crises may or may not be aligned. This paper explores such alignment by perusing how the European Union’s NextGenerationEU (NGEU) plan and its centerpiece, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), contributed to shaping national crisis governance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on the political d…
Stronger conditionality for stronger compliance? Analysing the NGEU’s effect on the implementation of European semester recommendations
This study examines the capacity of the European Union (EU) to influence policy change in its member states by focusing on the impact of EU conditionality under the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) introduced as part of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) package adopted in response to COVID-19 pandemic. Using data on the evaluations of the implementation of the 2019–2020 country-specific recommendations (CSRs) before (2021) and after (2022–2024)…
From criticism to pragmatism? The impact of NGEU funding on party-based Euroscepticism in Italy
How do Euroskeptic parties adjust their rhetoric when the European Union expands its fiscal and redistributive role? We address this question by examining the impact of the next-generation EU (NGEU) program on parliamentary debates in Italy, the largest beneficiary of EU recovery funds. Drawing on an original dataset of over 700 hand-coded parliamentary statements covering 30 debates in the Italian Chamber of Deputies (2018–2024), we show that th…
Coalition politics under exceptional exogenous constraints: The Meloni government during the EU-financed economic recovery plan
Since its inauguration, the coalition dynamics characterizing the Meloni government have been interrelated with managing one of the largest investment plans in Italian history: the Next Generation EU-funded recovery plan. This windfall represents both a historic opportunity for economic revitalization and an unprecedented external constraint for Italy. By linking two established research agendas, the coalition life cycle and the Europeanisation o…
Do different parties respond to different problems? A comparative study of parliamentary questions across multiple countries
The identification of problem information is an important driver of political attention in parliament. This is widely acknowledged in the literature on party competition but there has been surprisingly little empirical research on the extent and when it matters. By relying on an extensive cross-country data set matching data on the policy content of parliamentary oral questions from ten European parliamentary democracies with well-established pro…
Generational and Ideological Gaps in Democratic Support: Seeds of Deconsolidation in Post-Crisis Southern Europe
This article explores trends in overall levels of democratic support in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece. Additionally, the article examines the extent to which the experience of the steep economic downturn in Southern Europe had specific effects on democratic support across different generations and ideological groups by examining survey data that span three decades. The evidence is mixed concerning the resilience of democratic values in the f…
Legislative agendas during periods of inequality: Evidence from Europe and the United States
This article investigates the relationship between economic inequality and legislative agendas. It argues that rising inequality makes agenda setting especially vulnerable to the influence of economic elites, and that elites use their influence to keep redistributive policies from receiving governmental attention. Empirical tests use data on public laws and bills introduced in the legislatures of five European countries between 1981 and 2012, and…
Fighting Covid-19 on Democratic Terms. Parliamentary Functioning in Italy and Denmark during the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic challenged parliamentary decisionmaking, which is normally based on time-consuming deliberation and scrutiny. We ask how national parliaments met this challenge during the first wave in the spring 2020, and we argue that institutional powers of the executive designed to handle crises just like a pandemic, paradoxically, increase challenges to democratic decision-making because the parliament misses opportunities to negotiate…
(A falta de) Poder de definição de agenda do parlamento sobre a agenda de decisões executivas: Evidências da Bélgica, França e Portugal
One of the functions of parliamentary questions in modern legislatures is to pressure executives to pay attention to specific issues. But can these questions effectively influence executive decisions? There is surprisingly little empirical research in this area. Adopting an agenda-setting perspective, this article examines the extent to which issue attention in oral parliamentary questions influences the issues addressed in the weekly meetings of…
Parliament’s (lack of) agenda-setting power over the executive decision agenda: Evidence from Belgium, France and Portugal
One of the functions of parliamentary questions in modern legislatures is to pressure executives to pay attention to specific issues. But can these questions effectively influence executive decisions? There is surprisingly little empirical research in this area. Adopting an agenda-setting perspective, this article examines the extent to which issue attention in oral parliamentary questions influences the issues addressed in the weekly meetings of…
Party Manifestos, Opposition and Media as Determinants of the Cabinet Agenda
Cabinets are the engine of policy change in parliamentary systems. Yet, we still know little about how cabinets micro-manage the content of their multifaceted agenda during their term in office. Drawing on the party and agenda-setting literature, this article addresses this gap by focusing on three main determinants of cabinet priorities: issue priorities in the electoral platforms of majority and opposition parties, and new and unforeseen proble…
Parliamentary Questions as an Instrument for Geographic Representation: The Hard Case of Portugal
This article asks whether and why, in a system lacking electoral incentives to cultivate personal votes, MPs might choose to signal to geographic constituents. It explores this question by analysing the number of written parliamentary questions submitted to the Portuguese parliament on two issues – unemployment and crime – between 2009 and 2015, and asking if MPs are more inclined to table questions on specific issues when their districts suffer …
Recensão: Ensaios de Política Comparada, de Giovanni Sartori
Populism, Blame Shifting and the Crisis: Discourse Strategies in Portuguese Political Parties
Populist parties have been gaining ground in European political systems. Against this backcloth, Portugal stands out as the only Southern European country in which traditional mainstream parties have not faced a sharp rise in populist challengers. This article relies on content analysis of election manifestos to examine the use of populist claims by the main Portuguese parties before and after the crisis (1995–2015). Our findings reveal that popu…
From agenda setters to agenda takers? The determinants of party issue attention in times of crisis
Question time represents one of the most relevant institutional arenas where parties compete to get their favourite issues on the parliamentary agenda. Parties select which issue to address by weighing up two commitments simultaneously: fulfilling the party mandate received by their voters at election time and responding to the current priorities of voters. This article assesses the extent to which the recent sovereign debt crisis impacted the wa…
Productivity and Reselection in a Party-based Environment: Evidence from the Portuguese Case
Portugal is a crucial case when studying candidate reselection in a party-dominated setting. While we expect the productivity of Members of Parliament (MP) to be strongly associated with reselection, it should not affect the position of reselected representatives on the party list. These expectations are tested using data on MPs’ parliamentary activities across eight years (from 2007 to 2015), while controlling for alternative hypotheses. Althoug…
Delegated decree authority in a parliamentary system: The exercise of legislative delegation in Italy (1987–2013)
The substantial increase in the delegation of legislative powers from the parliament to the executive has been singled out as one of the most prominent changes in the Italian political system of the last three decades. It has given traditionally weak executives the opportunity to adopt significant reforms while bypassing the notorious fetters of the ordinary legislative process. While the literature has to date focused on the motivations to deleg…
Changing the transmission belt: The programme-to-policy link in Italy between the First and Second Republic
This article analyses the transmission of policy priorities from electoral campaigns to legislative outputs under different institutional configurations. Taking an agenda-setting approach, the article tests whether a mandate effect exists, if incumbents also uptake the priorities of their competitors, and whether and how the introduction of alternation in government impacts on these dynamics. The analysis relies on data sets of the Italian Agenda…
Policy agendas in Italy: Introduction to the Special Issue
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 ran…
Challenging Italian centralism through the vertical shift of competences to the subnational and supranational levels
This article shows that even though the high hopes of Italy’s most radical federalist advocates were largely dashed as the country remains a regionalised state within a less-than-federal European Union (EU), there have in fact been changes in the vertical allocation of competences since the early 1990s. The article maps these transformations in Italian democracy by tracing the formal transfer of national powers to subnational and EU levels. In ad…
Legislative processes as sequences: Exploring temporal trajectories of Italian law-making by means of sequence analysis
The study of time in legislative processes has so far understood time mainly as duration (of the process as a whole or of its single stages). This work contributes to existing research by presenting a new approach to the study of time which takes as the unit of analysis the whole temporal trajectory followed by a bill from its introduction to the floor to its final adoption. Legislative processes are conceived of as sequences of stages a bill has…
EU law revisions and legislative drift
European Union research has made great strides in understanding the dynamics of the European Union decision-making process. In contrast to this progress, the dynamics unfolding after the enactment of a European Union secondary legislative act has largely been ignored. Some of these acts remain in force in their original form for several years while others are revised soon after their enactment. What factors account for this variation? We empirica…
The role of subnational authorities in the implementation of EU directives
Studien zur Rolle von Regionen in der EU-Politik konzentrierten sich bislang hauptsächlich auf die politische Aushandlung und Implementation von Strukturfonds. In diesem Beitrag möchten die Autoren diese Schieflage durch eine Untersuchung der formalen Rolle subnationaler Verwaltungen bei der Implementation von EU-Regulierungen, insbesondere bei der Umsetzung von Richtlinien, zurechtrücken. Subnationale Verwaltungen spielen eine zweitrangige, aber…
From agenda setters to agenda takers? The determinants of party issue attention in times of crisis
Question time represents one of the most relevant institutional arenas where parties compete to get their favourite issues on the parliamentary agenda. Parties select which issue to address by weighing up two commitments simultaneously: fulfilling the party mandate received by their voters at election time and responding to the current priorities of voters. This article assesses the extent to which the recent sovereign debt crisis impacted the wa…
Parliamentary Questions as an Instrument for Geographic Representation: The Hard Case of Portugal
This article asks whether and why, in a system lacking electoral incentives to cultivate personal votes, MPs might choose to signal to geographic constituents. It explores this question by analysing the number of written parliamentary questions submitted to the Portuguese parliament on two issues – unemployment and crime – between 2009 and 2015, and asking if MPs are more inclined to table questions on specific issues when their districts suffer …
Productivity and Reselection in a Party-based Environment: Evidence from the Portuguese Case
Portugal is a crucial case when studying candidate reselection in a party-dominated setting. While we expect the productivity of Members of Parliament (MP) to be strongly associated with reselection, it should not affect the position of reselected representatives on the party list. These expectations are tested using data on MPs’ parliamentary activities across eight years (from 2007 to 2015), while controlling for alternative hypotheses. Althoug…
Party Manifestos, Opposition and Media as Determinants of the Cabinet Agenda
Cabinets are the engine of policy change in parliamentary systems. Yet, we still know little about how cabinets micro-manage the content of their multifaceted agenda during their term in office. Drawing on the party and agenda-setting literature, this article addresses this gap by focusing on three main determinants of cabinet priorities: issue priorities in the electoral platforms of majority and opposition parties, and new and unforeseen proble…
Populism, Blame Shifting and the Crisis: Discourse Strategies in Portuguese Political Parties
Populist parties have been gaining ground in European political systems. Against this backcloth, Portugal stands out as the only Southern European country in which traditional mainstream parties have not faced a sharp rise in populist challengers. This article relies on content analysis of election manifestos to examine the use of populist claims by the main Portuguese parties before and after the crisis (1995–2015). Our findings reveal that popu…
Fighting Covid-19 on Democratic Terms. Parliamentary Functioning in Italy and Denmark during the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic challenged parliamentary decisionmaking, which is normally based on time-consuming deliberation and scrutiny. We ask how national parliaments met this challenge during the first wave in the spring 2020, and we argue that institutional powers of the executive designed to handle crises just like a pandemic, paradoxically, increase challenges to democratic decision-making because the parliament misses opportunities to negotiate…
Coalition politics under exceptional exogenous constraints: The Meloni government during the EU-financed economic recovery plan
Since its inauguration, the coalition dynamics characterizing the Meloni government have been interrelated with managing one of the largest investment plans in Italian history: the Next Generation EU-funded recovery plan. This windfall represents both a historic opportunity for economic revitalization and an unprecedented external constraint for Italy. By linking two established research agendas, the coalition life cycle and the Europeanisation o…
Changing the transmission belt: The programme-to-policy link in Italy between the First and Second Republic
This article analyses the transmission of policy priorities from electoral campaigns to legislative outputs under different institutional configurations. Taking an agenda-setting approach, the article tests whether a mandate effect exists, if incumbents also uptake the priorities of their competitors, and whether and how the introduction of alternation in government impacts on these dynamics. The analysis relies on data sets of the Italian Agenda…
Do different parties respond to different problems? A comparative study of parliamentary questions across multiple countries
The identification of problem information is an important driver of political attention in parliament. This is widely acknowledged in the literature on party competition but there has been surprisingly little empirical research on the extent and when it matters. By relying on an extensive cross-country data set matching data on the policy content of parliamentary oral questions from ten European parliamentary democracies with well-established pro…
A Long Way to Tipperary: Time in the Italian Legislative Process 1987–2008
The Italian legislature does not enjoy widespread trust. At least one of the reasons has to be the perception of its inefficiency. Comparatively, the Italian law-making process is slow and most policy-makers complain about the difficulties experienced in trying to speed up the process. In spite of the political relevance of the topic, the issue has not attracted much scientific attention. This study tries to cover that void, focusing explicitly o…
Generational and Ideological Gaps in Democratic Support: Seeds of Deconsolidation in Post-Crisis Southern Europe
This article explores trends in overall levels of democratic support in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece. Additionally, the article examines the extent to which the experience of the steep economic downturn in Southern Europe had specific effects on democratic support across different generations and ideological groups by examining survey data that span three decades. The evidence is mixed concerning the resilience of democratic values in the f…
Legislative agendas during periods of inequality: Evidence from Europe and the United States
This article investigates the relationship between economic inequality and legislative agendas. It argues that rising inequality makes agenda setting especially vulnerable to the influence of economic elites, and that elites use their influence to keep redistributive policies from receiving governmental attention. Empirical tests use data on public laws and bills introduced in the legislatures of five European countries between 1981 and 2012, and…
EU law revisions and legislative drift
European Union research has made great strides in understanding the dynamics of the European Union decision-making process. In contrast to this progress, the dynamics unfolding after the enactment of a European Union secondary legislative act has largely been ignored. Some of these acts remain in force in their original form for several years while others are revised soon after their enactment. What factors account for this variation? We empirica…
Reform Agendas in National Recovery and Resilience Plans: Partisan Politics and Domestic Usages of Europe
This article examines the agency of national executives in shaping the reform agendas within the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) under the EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). Through a comparative analysis of NRRPs drafting in Germany, France, Italy and Spain, and an in‐depth longitudinal study of Italy, we argue that the partisan profile of national executives, to a significant extent, accounts for which reforms were incl…
Legislative processes as sequences: Exploring temporal trajectories of Italian law-making by means of sequence analysis
The study of time in legislative processes has so far understood time mainly as duration (of the process as a whole or of its single stages). This work contributes to existing research by presenting a new approach to the study of time which takes as the unit of analysis the whole temporal trajectory followed by a bill from its introduction to the floor to its final adoption. Legislative processes are conceived of as sequences of stages a bill has…
Stronger conditionality for stronger compliance? Analysing the NGEU’s effect on the implementation of European semester recommendations
This study examines the capacity of the European Union (EU) to influence policy change in its member states by focusing on the impact of EU conditionality under the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) introduced as part of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) package adopted in response to COVID-19 pandemic. Using data on the evaluations of the implementation of the 2019–2020 country-specific recommendations (CSRs) before (2021) and after (2022–2024)…
Policy agendas in Italy: Introduction to the Special Issue
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 ran…
Is the populist Robin Hood a fairy tale? Parliamentary attention to social welfare
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, populist parties rose to prominence across Europe, campaigning on the promise to do something about growing economic inequality by funding social welfare programs. We investigate if the pro-welfare reputation of European populist parties, either on the left or the right, is well deserved. We draw on a dataset of questions asked by members of parliament from nine European democracies over three decades. We …
Delegated decree authority in a parliamentary system: The exercise of legislative delegation in Italy (1987–2013)
The substantial increase in the delegation of legislative powers from the parliament to the executive has been singled out as one of the most prominent changes in the Italian political system of the last three decades. It has given traditionally weak executives the opportunity to adopt significant reforms while bypassing the notorious fetters of the ordinary legislative process. While the literature has to date focused on the motivations to deleg…
The role of subnational authorities in the implementation of EU directives
Studien zur Rolle von Regionen in der EU-Politik konzentrierten sich bislang hauptsächlich auf die politische Aushandlung und Implementation von Strukturfonds. In diesem Beitrag möchten die Autoren diese Schieflage durch eine Untersuchung der formalen Rolle subnationaler Verwaltungen bei der Implementation von EU-Regulierungen, insbesondere bei der Umsetzung von Richtlinien, zurechtrücken. Subnationale Verwaltungen spielen eine zweitrangige, aber…
A Long Way to Tipperary: Time in the Italian Legislative Process 1987–2008
The Italian legislature does not enjoy widespread trust. At least one of the reasons has to be the perception of its inefficiency. Comparatively, the Italian law-making process is slow and most policy-makers complain about the difficulties experienced in trying to speed up the process. In spite of the political relevance of the topic, the issue has not attracted much scientific attention. This study tries to cover that void, focusing explicitly o…
Legislative processes as sequences: Exploring temporal trajectories of Italian law-making by means of sequence analysis
The study of time in legislative processes has so far understood time mainly as duration (of the process as a whole or of its single stages). This work contributes to existing research by presenting a new approach to the study of time which takes as the unit of analysis the whole temporal trajectory followed by a bill from its introduction to the floor to its final adoption. Legislative processes are conceived of as sequences of stages a bill has…
EU law revisions and legislative drift
European Union research has made great strides in understanding the dynamics of the European Union decision-making process. In contrast to this progress, the dynamics unfolding after the enactment of a European Union secondary legislative act has largely been ignored. Some of these acts remain in force in their original form for several years while others are revised soon after their enactment. What factors account for this variation? We empirica…
Challenging Italian centralism through the vertical shift of competences to the subnational and supranational levels
This article shows that even though the high hopes of Italy’s most radical federalist advocates were largely dashed as the country remains a regionalised state within a less-than-federal European Union (EU), there have in fact been changes in the vertical allocation of competences since the early 1990s. The article maps these transformations in Italian democracy by tracing the formal transfer of national powers to subnational and EU levels. In ad…
Populism, Blame Shifting and the Crisis: Discourse Strategies in Portuguese Political Parties
Populist parties have been gaining ground in European political systems. Against this backcloth, Portugal stands out as the only Southern European country in which traditional mainstream parties have not faced a sharp rise in populist challengers. This article relies on content analysis of election manifestos to examine the use of populist claims by the main Portuguese parties before and after the crisis (1995–2015). Our findings reveal that popu…
From agenda setters to agenda takers? The determinants of party issue attention in times of crisis
Question time represents one of the most relevant institutional arenas where parties compete to get their favourite issues on the parliamentary agenda. Parties select which issue to address by weighing up two commitments simultaneously: fulfilling the party mandate received by their voters at election time and responding to the current priorities of voters. This article assesses the extent to which the recent sovereign debt crisis impacted the wa…
Productivity and Reselection in a Party-based Environment: Evidence from the Portuguese Case
Portugal is a crucial case when studying candidate reselection in a party-dominated setting. While we expect the productivity of Members of Parliament (MP) to be strongly associated with reselection, it should not affect the position of reselected representatives on the party list. These expectations are tested using data on MPs’ parliamentary activities across eight years (from 2007 to 2015), while controlling for alternative hypotheses. Althoug…
Delegated decree authority in a parliamentary system: The exercise of legislative delegation in Italy (1987–2013)
The substantial increase in the delegation of legislative powers from the parliament to the executive has been singled out as one of the most prominent changes in the Italian political system of the last three decades. It has given traditionally weak executives the opportunity to adopt significant reforms while bypassing the notorious fetters of the ordinary legislative process. While the literature has to date focused on the motivations to deleg…
Changing the transmission belt: The programme-to-policy link in Italy between the First and Second Republic
This article analyses the transmission of policy priorities from electoral campaigns to legislative outputs under different institutional configurations. Taking an agenda-setting approach, the article tests whether a mandate effect exists, if incumbents also uptake the priorities of their competitors, and whether and how the introduction of alternation in government impacts on these dynamics. The analysis relies on data sets of the Italian Agenda…
Policy agendas in Italy: Introduction to the Special Issue
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 ran…
Recensão: Ensaios de Política Comparada, de Giovanni Sartori
(A falta de) Poder de definição de agenda do parlamento sobre a agenda de decisões executivas: Evidências da Bélgica, França e Portugal
One of the functions of parliamentary questions in modern legislatures is to pressure executives to pay attention to specific issues. But can these questions effectively influence executive decisions? There is surprisingly little empirical research in this area. Adopting an agenda-setting perspective, this article examines the extent to which issue attention in oral parliamentary questions influences the issues addressed in the weekly meetings of…
Parliament’s (lack of) agenda-setting power over the executive decision agenda: Evidence from Belgium, France and Portugal
One of the functions of parliamentary questions in modern legislatures is to pressure executives to pay attention to specific issues. But can these questions effectively influence executive decisions? There is surprisingly little empirical research in this area. Adopting an agenda-setting perspective, this article examines the extent to which issue attention in oral parliamentary questions influences the issues addressed in the weekly meetings of…
Party Manifestos, Opposition and Media as Determinants of the Cabinet Agenda
Cabinets are the engine of policy change in parliamentary systems. Yet, we still know little about how cabinets micro-manage the content of their multifaceted agenda during their term in office. Drawing on the party and agenda-setting literature, this article addresses this gap by focusing on three main determinants of cabinet priorities: issue priorities in the electoral platforms of majority and opposition parties, and new and unforeseen proble…
Parliamentary Questions as an Instrument for Geographic Representation: The Hard Case of Portugal
This article asks whether and why, in a system lacking electoral incentives to cultivate personal votes, MPs might choose to signal to geographic constituents. It explores this question by analysing the number of written parliamentary questions submitted to the Portuguese parliament on two issues – unemployment and crime – between 2009 and 2015, and asking if MPs are more inclined to table questions on specific issues when their districts suffer …
Generational and Ideological Gaps in Democratic Support: Seeds of Deconsolidation in Post-Crisis Southern Europe
This article explores trends in overall levels of democratic support in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece. Additionally, the article examines the extent to which the experience of the steep economic downturn in Southern Europe had specific effects on democratic support across different generations and ideological groups by examining survey data that span three decades. The evidence is mixed concerning the resilience of democratic values in the f…
Legislative agendas during periods of inequality: Evidence from Europe and the United States
This article investigates the relationship between economic inequality and legislative agendas. It argues that rising inequality makes agenda setting especially vulnerable to the influence of economic elites, and that elites use their influence to keep redistributive policies from receiving governmental attention. Empirical tests use data on public laws and bills introduced in the legislatures of five European countries between 1981 and 2012, and…
Fighting Covid-19 on Democratic Terms. Parliamentary Functioning in Italy and Denmark during the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic challenged parliamentary decisionmaking, which is normally based on time-consuming deliberation and scrutiny. We ask how national parliaments met this challenge during the first wave in the spring 2020, and we argue that institutional powers of the executive designed to handle crises just like a pandemic, paradoxically, increase challenges to democratic decision-making because the parliament misses opportunities to negotiate…
Coalition politics under exceptional exogenous constraints: The Meloni government during the EU-financed economic recovery plan
Since its inauguration, the coalition dynamics characterizing the Meloni government have been interrelated with managing one of the largest investment plans in Italian history: the Next Generation EU-funded recovery plan. This windfall represents both a historic opportunity for economic revitalization and an unprecedented external constraint for Italy. By linking two established research agendas, the coalition life cycle and the Europeanisation o…
Do different parties respond to different problems? A comparative study of parliamentary questions across multiple countries
The identification of problem information is an important driver of political attention in parliament. This is widely acknowledged in the literature on party competition but there has been surprisingly little empirical research on the extent and when it matters. By relying on an extensive cross-country data set matching data on the policy content of parliamentary oral questions from ten European parliamentary democracies with well-established pro…
Alignment and asymmetry: European and national crisis governance under the Recovery and Resilience Facility
The European Union (EU) and its member states are a paradigmatic case of governance at multiple levels, whose interpretation and resolution of crises may or may not be aligned. This paper explores such alignment by perusing how the European Union’s NextGenerationEU (NGEU) plan and its centerpiece, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), contributed to shaping national crisis governance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on the political d…
Stronger conditionality for stronger compliance? Analysing the NGEU’s effect on the implementation of European semester recommendations
This study examines the capacity of the European Union (EU) to influence policy change in its member states by focusing on the impact of EU conditionality under the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) introduced as part of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) package adopted in response to COVID-19 pandemic. Using data on the evaluations of the implementation of the 2019–2020 country-specific recommendations (CSRs) before (2021) and after (2022–2024)…
From criticism to pragmatism? The impact of NGEU funding on party-based Euroscepticism in Italy
How do Euroskeptic parties adjust their rhetoric when the European Union expands its fiscal and redistributive role? We address this question by examining the impact of the next-generation EU (NGEU) program on parliamentary debates in Italy, the largest beneficiary of EU recovery funds. Drawing on an original dataset of over 700 hand-coded parliamentary statements covering 30 debates in the Italian Chamber of Deputies (2018–2024), we show that th…
From sanctions to incentives: The impact of NextGenerationEU on the European Semester
Whereas the EU has been effective in designing ex ante conditionality for accession and Euro adoption, it has struggled to influence domestic reforms once membership is secured. Soft coordination instruments, notably the European Semester, have therefore been regarded as weak. In response to the Covid-19 crisis, NextGenerationEU (NGEU) introduced an incentive-based model of conditionality, moving beyond the Semester’s ineffective sanctions. Using…
Political science (24 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Economics (15 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (14 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Public Administration (13 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (12 works) · Sociology (12 works)