Did the citizenship income scheme do it? The supposed electoral consequence of a flagship policy

Citizenship income credit card

In the aftermath of the 2022 Italian legislative elections, but also during the entire electoral campaign, several claims were made that much of the electoral support for the Five Star Movement had been triggered by the ‘Reddito di cittadinanza’ – the welfare policy introduced in 2019 by the yellow–green government. This research note first distinguishes between distributive politics and policy voting, and then explores the empirical relationship between the geographical provision at the municipal level of the citizenship income and the vote for the party led by Giuseppe Conte. While traditional multivariate analyses fail to reveal any spurious relationship, matching techniques help highlight the absence of any causal relationship between the two variables.

 Marco Giuliani (2023).  Did the citizenship income scheme do it? The supposed electoral consequence of a flagship policy. Italian Political Science Review DOI: 10.1017/ipo.2023.19

COVID-19 counterfactual evidence. Estimating the effects of school closures

School closure

Scholars have started to estimate the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce the health impact of COVID-19.
However, the empirical evidence is highly contested, and since it is not known exactly what would have happened without those measures, political élites are left free to give credit to the voices that they prefer the most.
We argue that any sensible assessment of the effectiveness of anti-COVID policies requires methodological reflection on what is actually comparable, and how to approximate the ideal “method of difference” theorized by John Stuart Mill.
By evaluating the effectiveness of school closures as an anti-COVID policy, we provide two examples in which appropriate counterfactuals are inductively discovered rather than selected a priori. In the first one, we use Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) in a cross-country setting, while in the second one, we implement the Synthetic Control Method in a within-country analysis. The article highlights the methodological advantages of including these techniques in the toolbox of policy scholars, while both examples confirm the effectiveness of school closures.

Marco Giuliani (2023) COVID-19 counterfactual evidence. Estimating the effects of school closures, Policy Studies, 44(1): 112-131, DOI: 10.1080/01442872.2022.2103527

The Utility of Replication

The utility of replication: Exploring the impact of corporatism and consensualism with multiple models, methods, and operationalizations

SAGE Research Methods Cases. 2019 doi:10.4135/9781526475541

Replicating the work of others is much more useful and challenging than is generally acknowledged. In this case study, I review the multiple replications that I had to perform to investigate the relationship between consensualism and corporatism that represented a constitutive element of Arend Lijphart’s analysis of the performance of opposite patterns of democracy. The replication exercise was part of my own contribution to that topic, but it was further prompted and expanded by the comments and suggestions received from the journal’s referees. I here produce a first classification of types of replication, underlining the aim and helpfulness of each of them.