Fedra Negri

Are governing parties able to shape social and labor market policies according to their ideological positions or are they overwhelmed by socio-economic and institutional constraints? The paper answers this crucial question by developing a comparative study on 19 OECD countries from 1985 to 2011. It investigates whether the location of governments on a continuous left–right scale affects four measures of welfare state generosity: namely, public spending in social policies, in active and passive labor market policies and the level of unemployment insurance replacement rate. The results obtained through an error correction model show that governing parties are unable to affect social and labor market policies in the short-run, when economic dynamics prevail. However, in the long-run, partisanship gains relevance: when the government coalition moves to the right, there is a negative impact on all the measures of welfare state generosity.

Does European state building go hand in hand with European nation building? This article engages with the scholarly debate on the dynamic relationship between the construction of supranational political institutions that exert key functions of sovereignty and collective identities by investigating the extent to which the adoption of the Euro as a currency is associated with a decrease in the share of Europeans who identify exclusively with their nation and not with the European Union. In detail, by using a dynamic panel-data model on 26 European Union countries in the post-Maastricht period (1996–2017), our results show that the Euro has fostered European identity, leading to a small but significant decrease (-3%) in the share of Europeans with exclusive national identity.

Political economists show that outsiders (unemployed and temporary workers) support redistributive policies more than insiders (standard dependent workers) and infer outsiders' voting behavior from their desired degree of State intervention in the economy. However, it has been suggested that international interdependence is reshaping the political space along two dimensions: the traditional economic left-right scale, and an emerging cultural integration-demarcation dimension. How do outsiders behave in this two-dimensional political landscape? This research note answers this question by combining individual data from the latest five waves of the European Social Survey (2008–2016) with party positions provided by the Comparative Manifesto Project on 27 European countries. Integrating research based on party families with parties’ policy positions, results show that the economic State-market dimension is still more linked to outsiders’ voting behavior than the cultural integration-demarcation dimension.

Can income equality and national wealth go hand in hand? This issue has long marked the distance between the neoliberal and the social democratic policy paradigms. By combining so far unrelated streams of literature, we sketch a theoretical framework in which fiscal policies shape four “fiscal worlds”, each of them characterized by a special balance between income equality and national wealth. Then, we resort to Boolean algebra and fuzzy sets to develop a measure that encompasses both these policy outcomes at once without assuming any a priori functional relationship. Last, we assess the heuristic capacity of our measure by mapping the EU countries’ membership to the four fiscal worlds from 2007 until 2016 and the trajectories they followed.

The election of President Mattarella is a turning point in Matteo Renzi’s attempt to reform the constitution. This choice determined the loss of Forza Italia’s support to the constitutional reform, thus leaving the Renzi cabinet and the Democratic Party alone on the Yes-side. Our goal is to assess the degree of Renzi’s misjudgment by comparing two theoretical perspectives on voting behavior in direct-democratic settings through a nested design. Our results highlight that vote choices can be explained by both the systematic and the heuristic modes of information processing. Respondents’ agreement with the content of the reform (systematic mode) and a positive evaluation of the Renzi cabinet (heuristic mode) are key predictors of Yes vote. Instead, the negative assessment of the economic situation is a crucial driver of No vote. Lastly, we build a bridge between these two perspectives by showing that partisan attachments conditioned the effect of respondents’ content evaluation on voting behavior.

A lively debate among students of parliamentary democracy concerns how coalition governments build their policy proposals. Some scholars maintain that government declarations mirror the position of the median party in Parliament; others argue that these proposals better agree with the weighted mean of the coalition parties’ electoral promises. This paper sheds lights on this puzzle by investigating the role played by several political actors in shaping government declarations in two dimensions: the ideological left-right scale and a genuinely policy-based welfare scale. The results reveal that the agenda setters on the two dimensions do not coincide. On the left-right scale, the Prime Minister’s party plays a leading role. On the welfare scale, government declarations are affected by the party of the median legislator in Parliament and by the parties of the labour and social affairs ministers. Furthermore, government declarations on the welfare dimension tend to drift rightward with adverse economic conditions.

This volume focuses on the relationship among politics, policies and media. Indeed, it analyzes whether and to what extent newspapers are able to inform citizens on the main public policy developments which are likely to affect their lives. Through the content analysis of the articles published by the most important Italian newspapers on three public policies over the last 20 years, this volume demonstrates that Italian newspapers tend to devote more attention to politics, namely to power dynamics among actors, than to policy contents.

This dissertation investigates how well political parties, especially those holding executive positions, achieve policy congruence by translating voters' redistributive preferences into consistent social policy outcomes. In detail, it addresses this topic by conducting large-N studies with the aid of quantitative techniques.

This essay is divided into two sections. The frst one aims to discuss how does the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), developed by Paul A. Sabatier and Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, relate to the Discursive Institutionalism (DI), as defned by Vivien A. Schmidt (2006 and 2008).
In particular, the relationship between the ACF and the DI is discussed, frstly, describing how the both adopt as main objects of analysis ideas and discourse, then, explaining the role played by these notions in originating and explaining institutional change.

The second section intends to show how the same framework, in the boundaries of DI, re-frames theoretical tools from the older new institutionalisms. Therefore, the essay embraces the idea, formulated by Schmidt, according to which DI has to be
considered as a natural progression from the older three new institutionalisms, which, in turns, have to be seen as background knowledge to the DI approach.
Particularly, to address this issue, the second section introduces the theory of action developed by the ACF in order to show how this theoretical framework relates to the Rational Choice (RI) and the Sociological Institutionalism (SI).

The current research originates from a professional experience of mine as policy-analyst in the “Central Markets project - Revitalizing and promoting traditional markets in Central Europe!” for the Conservatory of Mediterranean Food from Piedmont, a non-profit association in the filed of research and promotion of culinary
heritage, tourism and cultural development of Mediterranean countries.

The “Central Markets” is a three year European project co-financed by the Central Europe Programme
promoting urban markets as important economic, social and cultural engines for the development of urban districts. The project involves nine organizations from six countries (Italy, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Slovak Republic), referring both to the public and to the private sector. Namely, the partners
involved in this project are local (City of Venice, City of Turin, City of Bratislava, City of Krakow) and regional (Usti Region) authorities, development agencies (Pics Development Agency and Maribor Development Agency), the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Veszprem County and the Conservatory of Mediterranean Food Association from Piedmont. In particular, the current research is born from the idea that it is necessary, in order to define policies for markets' support and promotion, to compare the existing national and regional legislation in the market field.

From the methodological point of view, all relevant informations about national and local legislation have been directly gathered from the "Central Markets” Project's local partners through two separate surveys, the first one concerning EU and national legislations, the second one concerning the urban markets'governance systems. Surveys have been elaborated and submitted by e-mail to local partners from October to December 2012 by the Conservatory of Mediterranean Food. Surveys have been collected by the same organization during the month of January 2013.

The paper is structured as follows. Firstly, it presents the two different approaches developed in the existing literature to explain the variation in compliance with EU directives between European member states, namely the management and the enforcement schools of thought.

Then, the paper focuses on the “Bolkestein Directive” case-study. Firstly, it identifies the different levels of government involved in the urban markets' governance systems, from Governments and Parliaments, which generate laws and framework regulations, to the cities, that play a key role in defining management aspects.
The informations gathered from our partners depict an heterogeneous image: from situations in which the public actor has an almost exclusively role (Hungary and Italy) to others where private companies with public capital take on management roles (Slovenia and Slovak Republic), to the extreme situation of Poland,
where the whole management is delegated to the private sector.

Finally, it moves to the transposition of the Directive 2006/123/EC. The impact in the countries involved in the
project is very different. It goes from cases such as the Italian or, to a lesser extent, the Hungarian one, where the transposition of the Directive had direct effects on markets, to other situations in which there are low impacts (Poland and Slovak Republic) or where there are not significant impact at all (Slovenia).

Who is an individual? This research paper tries to answer this question by presenting three different conceptions of the self, developed in the XIX century by John Rawls, the leading theorist of the liberal-egalitarian paradigm (Cfr. Paragraph n. 1), Robert
Nozick, one of the main representatives of the libertarian paradigm (Cfr. Paragraph n. 2), and Michael Sandel, one of the main political philosophers of modern-day communitarianism (Cfr. Paragraph n. 3).

As argued in the following pages, these paradigms can be situated on a continuum from the radical individualistic conception of
the self proposed by Nozick to the radical communitarian one suggested by Sandel.

Is it possible to solve the dichotomy between these different thesis? Can the individual be described only as bearer of egoistic interests or as determined by its membership in a particular social group? The last paragraph tries to deal with these questions, expressing a judgment on the completeness and the normative persuasiveness of these conceptions of the self.

L'elaborato prende le mosse dalla domanda “L'Italia ha o meno bisogno di immigrazione?”. Sono quindi trascurate le
ragioni di natura etico-morale a suffragio dell'integrazione degli immigrati in nome dell'adozione di un approccio
utilitaristico volto a comprendere se questi ultimi “servano” o meno all'economia italiana. Grazie alla rilettura dei risultati
di numerosi studi, si dimostra come l'immigrazione costituisca una risorsa strategica per l'Italia in almeno tre dimensioni:
1. il mantenimento dell'attuale livello di benessere, 2. la sostenibilità sul lungo periodo del debito pubblico e 3. la tenuta
del sistema previdenziale.
Se l'immigrazione è una risorsa strategica, i pubblici poteri devono facilitare l'accesso degli immigrati a tre diritti
fondamentali, identificati dal CNEL quali fattori primari di integrazione: il diritto all'abitazione, il diritto al lavoro e il diritto
all'istruzione per i figli. L'elaborato indaga il primo di questi attraverso un'analisi della legislazione in materia, dal livello
internazionale a quello regionale, passando per l'ordinamento europeo.
Tale analisi permette di sostenere la seguente tesi: il nuovo riparto di competenze tra centro e periferia introdotto in Italia
dalla riforma del Titolo V Cost. ha attribuito alle Regioni un ruolo principe nella definizione dello standard di tutela dei
diritti sociali dello straniero, tra i quali quello all'abitazione, consentendo a queste ultime di derogare in melius al Testo
unico sull’immigrazione del 25 luglio 1998, n. 286, non costituendo quest'ultimo un divieto, ma semplicemente lo
standard minimo da assicurare in tutto il territorio nazionale.

La politica è chiamata ad assumere decisioni collettive e vincolanti, anche in presenza di forti conflitti sul loro contenuto. Nelle democrazie liberali, però, “decidere per decidere” non basta: coloro che esercitano il potere politico devono tradurre in politiche pubbliche le preferenze degli elettori. Un compito eccitante e faticoso, che grava principalmente sulle spalle dei partiti politici. Questo libro discute di come, dal secondo dopoguerra ad oggi, “il lavoro della politica” sia diventato più faticoso a causa di problemi globali e complessi, di costituency volatili e frammentate e di minoranze dense a difesa dello status quo. I partiti sono ancora in grado di tradurre i bisogni e gli interessi degli elettori in promesse elettorali prima, in impegni di governo poi e, infine, in scelte di policy? Per rispondere, percorreremo l’irto sentiero della responsiveness dalle preferenze degli elettori alle scelte di policy in materia di politiche sociali e del lavoro. Solo alla fine, scopriremo se la politica riesca ancora ad esercitare la sua funzione vitale, quella di decidere, o se sia ormai preda inerme e stremata, da un lato, del populismo, dall’altro, della tecnocrazia.

Abstract Why does the government appeal for concertation? Starting from the principal‒agent framework and delegation theory, the article argues that the government is more willing to share decision-making power with trade unions when the policy preferences endorsed by the unions are closer to those of the cabinet. Furthermore, it maintains that government propensity to negotiate with trade unions increases as the heterogeneity of union policy preferences grows because the cabinet can exploit its agenda-setting power to divide the union front. The article tests these two hypotheses through a longitudinal analysis of the Italian case (1946–2014). In detail, it takes advantage of two original datasets built through content analysis that provide unique in-depth information on the policy preferences of parties and cabinets and measures the policy positions of the main Italian trade unions, thus allowing assessment of their reciprocal heterogeneity. The results confirm the expectations.