Valerio Vignoli
Biographic Data
| ID | 4378924 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Valerio Vignoli |
| GIVEN NAMES | Valerio |
| FAMILY NAME | Vignoli |
| SIGNATURE | VIGNOLI V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Milan |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7893-1433 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 76 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Identifying delegation and constraints in legislative texts: A computational method applied to the European Union
We introduce a computational method for identifying delegating and constraining provisions in European Union (EU) laws. Leveraging the syntactic structures employed by legislators, we developed a set of extraction rules applied through a custom-built computational linguistics pipeline. We run through the pipeline more than 600,000 legal sentences that we extracted from 9319 laws adopted between 1958 and 2019. The application performs very well vi…
The Alliance Is Talking: Introducing the Nato Secretary General Document (Nato-SGD) Corpus
While text-as-data has gained prominence in the study of International Organizations (IOs) over the past decade, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has remained absent from this research wave. We present the NATO Secretary General Documents (NATO-SGD) corpus. It features over 3,000 speeches and statements for the 1996-2024 period, covering the tenures of six NATO Secretaries General. The corpus offers a comparable body of texts that ca…
The perception of Covid-19 amongst vulnerable subgroups of the general population in Italy: Insights from the qualitative study of the Most project
The findings of the present study may help shape a Health Belief Model-based intervention to promote well-being and the use of protective measures during pandemics
Does CFSP co-ordination foster convergence? Voting behavior on nuclear weapons at the UN General Assembly
Although the European Union (EU) has sought to promote the approximation of the foreign policy positions of member states since it established its Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) with the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, the impact of this intergovernmental forum has long been questioned. Recent developments putting the CFSP under strain such as the weakening transatlantic link, Russian attempts to undermine EU foreign policy unity, and th…
Who Cares: Why the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict Matters (More) to Some EU Member States
What drives the salience of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict amongst EU member states? This article employs domestic foreign policy theories to explain the factors underlying variation in salience, estimated analysing all country statements made at the United Nations General Assembly between 1993 and 2017. Our findings suggest that there is a U‐shaped relationship between government ideology and attention for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: gov…
The politics of military assistance: Italian parties’ positions on the war in Ukraine
In recent years, a research agenda on the party politics of military interventions has flourished. However, considerably less attention has been devoted to analysing party positions on the decision to provide military assistance to an actor involved in the conflict. This article focuses on Italy’s support for Ukraine after the 2022 Russian invasion. Triangulating quantitative and qualitative data, we examine party positions and how they evolved f…
Regional socialization and disarmament preferences: Explaining state positions on the nuclear ban treaty
We bring nuance to the understanding of cleavages among states over the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). We measure the positions of the participants to the 2022 and 2023 TPNW Meetings of State Parties, employing text-as-data approaches. Our results show that the participants can be placed along a single axis, roughly associated with whether they view nuclear disarmament in an "old" way as primarily a security problem or in a …
Treaty legalization, security interests, and ratification of multilateral disarmament treaties
Multilateral treaties are essential for the effectiveness of global disarmament efforts. Ratification delays have deep repercussions on international cooperation for disarmament. Yet what determines their duration? In this paper, we offer the first comprehensive study of multilateral disarmament treaty ratification, covering the period between 1976 and 2020. We test the effects of treaty legalization and a country's security situation on the rati…
Ideological Talk, Strategic Vote: German Parties’ Positions on the Military Intervention in Afghanistan in Parliament
Existing literature has examined party positions on military interventions across various countries, mostly using manifestos and expert surveys as sources of data. This article employs a different approach by analysing German parties’ positions on one mission only: the Afghanistan intervention (2001-2021). We extract positions from parliamentary speeches through the automated text scaling method Wordfish and from voting data, and we compare MPs’ …
Peace at Home, Conflict Abroad: Government Ideology, Mission Type, and Parliamentary Support for Military Interventions
International relations scholarship has long overlooked the role of parliament in shaping states’ decision to go to war. In contrast, recent studies explored variations in parliamentary war powers across time and countries and their impact on troop deployments abroad. However, a systematic analysis of the determinants of support for military interventions in parliament is still missing. This article fills this literature gap by examining votes on…
Trick or treaty? An empirical analysis of the treaty ratification process in Italy
Treaties are a fundamental tool of international politics. Therefore, existing literature has long investigated their ratification, the act through which an actor commits itself to the treaty’s content and its determinants. However, we believe this scholarship has three substantial limitations: a lack of comprehensive assessments of the differences between bilateral and multilateral treaties, a limited attention to small and middle powers, and a …
Concepts and measures of bureaucratic constraints in European Union laws from hand‐coding to machine‐learning
Scholars employ two main measures of the executive constraints embedded in European Union laws: one is based on the variation in the use of different types of restrictions, and the second is based on the frequency of such use. They reflect two alternative conceptualizations of bureaucratic control. We label them, respectively, as the “toolbox perspective” and the “design perspective”. We illustrate that the constraint frequency measure poses fewe…
Text as Data
Methods of text as data convert a large quantity of inherently unstructured text into structured data to be analyzed through statistical models. This group of techniques has been at the forefront of the latest methodological developments in comparative politics in recent years. However, their usage in the study for the study of international relations and foreign policy has been much more limited. The aim of this chapter is showing how text as da…
Italy’s Military Operations Abroad (1945–2020): Data, Patterns, and Trends
A significant engagement in military missions is probably the most distinctive feature of post-Cold War Italian foreign policy. In the last three decades, Italy has participated in an extensive number of operations across the world, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Several studies have described Italian troop deployments abroad, providing alternative explanations of the Italian military activism. However, despite a recent growing …
When politicization meets ideology: The European Parliament and free trade agreements
Since the Lisbon Treaty, the European Parliament (EP) has considerably increased its competencies in European Union (EU) trade policy. At the same time, a ‘new generation’ of free trade agreements (FTAs), including the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the United States, Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada, and the agreement with Japan, have been negotiated by the European Commission. Although ex…
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 barking dogs: Junior coalition partners and military operations abroad in Italy
Various studies explored under which conditions junior coalition partners are able to have an impact on foreign policy outcomes. However, these parties do not always manage to get what they want. In this situation, they face a dilemma: defecting or staying? In the Italian context, as far as Military Operations Abroad (MOA) are concerned, the latter option has invariably prevailed. In particular, Italy's involvement in Operation Allied Force in Ko…
Populist parties and foreign policy: The case of Italy’s Five Star Movement
The role of political parties in foreign policy is gaining increasing attention. Nonetheless, despite an extraordinary interest in ‘populism’, the foreign policy of populist parties has rarely been investigated. This article provides an innovative theoretical framework, applying it on a rare example of a ‘pure’ populist party: Italy’s Five Star Movement. How has Five Star Movement positioned on Italian contribution to military operations abroad? …
Where are the doves? Explaining party support for military operations abroad in Italy
Since the end of the Cold War, Italy has radically transformed its foreign and security policy, participating in several Military Operations Abroad (MOA) across the world. A few qualitative studies have already analysed how Italian parties debated and voted on this issue, underlining a bipartisan consensus between centre-left and centre-right parties, based on a common humanitarian narrative. This article provides a substantial methodological con…
Italian Political Parties and Military Operations: An Empirical Analysis on Voting Patterns
Since the end of the bipolar era, the military activism of several Western powers has raised questions about parliamentary control, fostering growing research and analyses on the features, drivers and consequences of the different kinds of oversight exercised by legislative assemblies. Within this scholarly debate, this article focuses on the under-studied case of Italy. How did Italian parties vote on military operations abroad in the post-Cold …
Systematic Revision of the Troglomorphic North American Scorpion Family Typhlochactidae (Scorpiones: (Chactoidea)
The scorpion family Typhlochactidae Mitchell, 1971, endemic to eastern Mexico, comprises nine troglomorphic species specialized for life in hypogean and endogean habitats. Due to their cryptic ecology, inaccessible habitat, and apparently low population density, Typhlochactidae are poorly known. Only 29 specimens have been collected in 40 years. Four species are known from a single specimen, two species are known only from the male and three only…
Italian Political Parties and Military Operations: An Empirical Analysis on Voting Patterns
Since the end of the bipolar era, the military activism of several Western powers has raised questions about parliamentary control, fostering growing research and analyses on the features, drivers and consequences of the different kinds of oversight exercised by legislative assemblies. Within this scholarly debate, this article focuses on the under-studied case of Italy. How did Italian parties vote on military operations abroad in the post-Cold …
Populist parties and foreign policy: The case of Italy’s Five Star Movement
The role of political parties in foreign policy is gaining increasing attention. Nonetheless, despite an extraordinary interest in ‘populism’, the foreign policy of populist parties has rarely been investigated. This article provides an innovative theoretical framework, applying it on a rare example of a ‘pure’ populist party: Italy’s Five Star Movement. How has Five Star Movement positioned on Italian contribution to military operations abroad? …
Ideological Talk, Strategic Vote: German Parties’ Positions on the Military Intervention in Afghanistan in Parliament
Existing literature has examined party positions on military interventions across various countries, mostly using manifestos and expert surveys as sources of data. This article employs a different approach by analysing German parties’ positions on one mission only: the Afghanistan intervention (2001-2021). We extract positions from parliamentary speeches through the automated text scaling method Wordfish and from voting data, and we compare MPs’ …
When politicization meets ideology: The European Parliament and free trade agreements
Since the Lisbon Treaty, the European Parliament (EP) has considerably increased its competencies in European Union (EU) trade policy. At the same time, a ‘new generation’ of free trade agreements (FTAs), including the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the United States, Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada, and the agreement with Japan, have been negotiated by the European Commission. Although ex…
The barking dogs: Junior coalition partners and military operations abroad in Italy
Various studies explored under which conditions junior coalition partners are able to have an impact on foreign policy outcomes. However, these parties do not always manage to get what they want. In this situation, they face a dilemma: defecting or staying? In the Italian context, as far as Military Operations Abroad (MOA) are concerned, the latter option has invariably prevailed. In particular, Italy's involvement in Operation Allied Force in Ko…
The politics of military assistance: Italian parties’ positions on the war in Ukraine
In recent years, a research agenda on the party politics of military interventions has flourished. However, considerably less attention has been devoted to analysing party positions on the decision to provide military assistance to an actor involved in the conflict. This article focuses on Italy’s support for Ukraine after the 2022 Russian invasion. Triangulating quantitative and qualitative data, we examine party positions and how they evolved f…
Concepts and measures of bureaucratic constraints in European Union laws from hand‐coding to machine‐learning
Scholars employ two main measures of the executive constraints embedded in European Union laws: one is based on the variation in the use of different types of restrictions, and the second is based on the frequency of such use. They reflect two alternative conceptualizations of bureaucratic control. We label them, respectively, as the “toolbox perspective” and the “design perspective”. We illustrate that the constraint frequency measure poses fewe…
Italy’s Military Operations Abroad (1945–2020): Data, Patterns, and Trends
A significant engagement in military missions is probably the most distinctive feature of post-Cold War Italian foreign policy. In the last three decades, Italy has participated in an extensive number of operations across the world, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Several studies have described Italian troop deployments abroad, providing alternative explanations of the Italian military activism. However, despite a recent growing …
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…
Where are the doves? Explaining party support for military operations abroad in Italy
Since the end of the Cold War, Italy has radically transformed its foreign and security policy, participating in several Military Operations Abroad (MOA) across the world. A few qualitative studies have already analysed how Italian parties debated and voted on this issue, underlining a bipartisan consensus between centre-left and centre-right parties, based on a common humanitarian narrative. This article provides a substantial methodological con…
Trick or treaty? An empirical analysis of the treaty ratification process in Italy
Treaties are a fundamental tool of international politics. Therefore, existing literature has long investigated their ratification, the act through which an actor commits itself to the treaty’s content and its determinants. However, we believe this scholarship has three substantial limitations: a lack of comprehensive assessments of the differences between bilateral and multilateral treaties, a limited attention to small and middle powers, and a …
Systematic Revision of the Troglomorphic North American Scorpion Family Typhlochactidae (Scorpiones: (Chactoidea)
The scorpion family Typhlochactidae Mitchell, 1971, endemic to eastern Mexico, comprises nine troglomorphic species specialized for life in hypogean and endogean habitats. Due to their cryptic ecology, inaccessible habitat, and apparently low population density, Typhlochactidae are poorly known. Only 29 specimens have been collected in 40 years. Four species are known from a single specimen, two species are known only from the male and three only…
Populist parties and foreign policy: The case of Italy’s Five Star Movement
The role of political parties in foreign policy is gaining increasing attention. Nonetheless, despite an extraordinary interest in ‘populism’, the foreign policy of populist parties has rarely been investigated. This article provides an innovative theoretical framework, applying it on a rare example of a ‘pure’ populist party: Italy’s Five Star Movement. How has Five Star Movement positioned on Italian contribution to military operations abroad? …
Where are the doves? Explaining party support for military operations abroad in Italy
Since the end of the Cold War, Italy has radically transformed its foreign and security policy, participating in several Military Operations Abroad (MOA) across the world. A few qualitative studies have already analysed how Italian parties debated and voted on this issue, underlining a bipartisan consensus between centre-left and centre-right parties, based on a common humanitarian narrative. This article provides a substantial methodological con…
Italian Political Parties and Military Operations: An Empirical Analysis on Voting Patterns
Since the end of the bipolar era, the military activism of several Western powers has raised questions about parliamentary control, fostering growing research and analyses on the features, drivers and consequences of the different kinds of oversight exercised by legislative assemblies. Within this scholarly debate, this article focuses on the under-studied case of Italy. How did Italian parties vote on military operations abroad in the post-Cold …
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 barking dogs: Junior coalition partners and military operations abroad in Italy
Various studies explored under which conditions junior coalition partners are able to have an impact on foreign policy outcomes. However, these parties do not always manage to get what they want. In this situation, they face a dilemma: defecting or staying? In the Italian context, as far as Military Operations Abroad (MOA) are concerned, the latter option has invariably prevailed. In particular, Italy's involvement in Operation Allied Force in Ko…
Text as Data
Methods of text as data convert a large quantity of inherently unstructured text into structured data to be analyzed through statistical models. This group of techniques has been at the forefront of the latest methodological developments in comparative politics in recent years. However, their usage in the study for the study of international relations and foreign policy has been much more limited. The aim of this chapter is showing how text as da…
Italy’s Military Operations Abroad (1945–2020): Data, Patterns, and Trends
A significant engagement in military missions is probably the most distinctive feature of post-Cold War Italian foreign policy. In the last three decades, Italy has participated in an extensive number of operations across the world, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Several studies have described Italian troop deployments abroad, providing alternative explanations of the Italian military activism. However, despite a recent growing …
When politicization meets ideology: The European Parliament and free trade agreements
Since the Lisbon Treaty, the European Parliament (EP) has considerably increased its competencies in European Union (EU) trade policy. At the same time, a ‘new generation’ of free trade agreements (FTAs), including the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the United States, Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada, and the agreement with Japan, have been negotiated by the European Commission. Although ex…
Peace at Home, Conflict Abroad: Government Ideology, Mission Type, and Parliamentary Support for Military Interventions
International relations scholarship has long overlooked the role of parliament in shaping states’ decision to go to war. In contrast, recent studies explored variations in parliamentary war powers across time and countries and their impact on troop deployments abroad. However, a systematic analysis of the determinants of support for military interventions in parliament is still missing. This article fills this literature gap by examining votes on…
Trick or treaty? An empirical analysis of the treaty ratification process in Italy
Treaties are a fundamental tool of international politics. Therefore, existing literature has long investigated their ratification, the act through which an actor commits itself to the treaty’s content and its determinants. However, we believe this scholarship has three substantial limitations: a lack of comprehensive assessments of the differences between bilateral and multilateral treaties, a limited attention to small and middle powers, and a …
Concepts and measures of bureaucratic constraints in European Union laws from hand‐coding to machine‐learning
Scholars employ two main measures of the executive constraints embedded in European Union laws: one is based on the variation in the use of different types of restrictions, and the second is based on the frequency of such use. They reflect two alternative conceptualizations of bureaucratic control. We label them, respectively, as the “toolbox perspective” and the “design perspective”. We illustrate that the constraint frequency measure poses fewe…
Regional socialization and disarmament preferences: Explaining state positions on the nuclear ban treaty
We bring nuance to the understanding of cleavages among states over the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). We measure the positions of the participants to the 2022 and 2023 TPNW Meetings of State Parties, employing text-as-data approaches. Our results show that the participants can be placed along a single axis, roughly associated with whether they view nuclear disarmament in an "old" way as primarily a security problem or in a …
Treaty legalization, security interests, and ratification of multilateral disarmament treaties
Multilateral treaties are essential for the effectiveness of global disarmament efforts. Ratification delays have deep repercussions on international cooperation for disarmament. Yet what determines their duration? In this paper, we offer the first comprehensive study of multilateral disarmament treaty ratification, covering the period between 1976 and 2020. We test the effects of treaty legalization and a country's security situation on the rati…
Ideological Talk, Strategic Vote: German Parties’ Positions on the Military Intervention in Afghanistan in Parliament
Existing literature has examined party positions on military interventions across various countries, mostly using manifestos and expert surveys as sources of data. This article employs a different approach by analysing German parties’ positions on one mission only: the Afghanistan intervention (2001-2021). We extract positions from parliamentary speeches through the automated text scaling method Wordfish and from voting data, and we compare MPs’ …
The perception of Covid-19 amongst vulnerable subgroups of the general population in Italy: Insights from the qualitative study of the Most project
The findings of the present study may help shape a Health Belief Model-based intervention to promote well-being and the use of protective measures during pandemics
Does CFSP co-ordination foster convergence? Voting behavior on nuclear weapons at the UN General Assembly
Although the European Union (EU) has sought to promote the approximation of the foreign policy positions of member states since it established its Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) with the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, the impact of this intergovernmental forum has long been questioned. Recent developments putting the CFSP under strain such as the weakening transatlantic link, Russian attempts to undermine EU foreign policy unity, and th…
Who Cares: Why the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict Matters (More) to Some EU Member States
What drives the salience of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict amongst EU member states? This article employs domestic foreign policy theories to explain the factors underlying variation in salience, estimated analysing all country statements made at the United Nations General Assembly between 1993 and 2017. Our findings suggest that there is a U‐shaped relationship between government ideology and attention for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: gov…
The politics of military assistance: Italian parties’ positions on the war in Ukraine
In recent years, a research agenda on the party politics of military interventions has flourished. However, considerably less attention has been devoted to analysing party positions on the decision to provide military assistance to an actor involved in the conflict. This article focuses on Italy’s support for Ukraine after the 2022 Russian invasion. Triangulating quantitative and qualitative data, we examine party positions and how they evolved f…
Identifying delegation and constraints in legislative texts: A computational method applied to the European Union
We introduce a computational method for identifying delegating and constraining provisions in European Union (EU) laws. Leveraging the syntactic structures employed by legislators, we developed a set of extraction rules applied through a custom-built computational linguistics pipeline. We run through the pipeline more than 600,000 legal sentences that we extracted from 9319 laws adopted between 1958 and 2019. The application performs very well vi…
The Alliance Is Talking: Introducing the Nato Secretary General Document (Nato-SGD) Corpus
While text-as-data has gained prominence in the study of International Organizations (IOs) over the past decade, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has remained absent from this research wave. We present the NATO Secretary General Documents (NATO-SGD) corpus. It features over 3,000 speeches and statements for the 1996-2024 period, covering the tenures of six NATO Secretaries General. The corpus offers a comparable body of texts that ca…
Political science (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · Global Peace and Security Dynamics (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Ideology (7 works) · Political economy (7 works)