Italy recently stepped up its attention to sub-Saharan Africa, but the Africa policy of this European middle power has rarely been the object of analysis. This paper expands our understanding of the diplomatic behaviour of middle powers and of Italy’s foreign policy approach in an entirely novel manner, that is, by investigating the rationale of some 700 bilateral agreements Rome signed with sub-Saharan countries between 1960 and 2022. Our study is innovative in two ways. First, it is the first quantitative investigation of Italy’s diplomatic relations with African states, comprising both a rigorous account of main trends, based on an original dataset, as well as a statistical analysis testing the potential factors behind Rome’s choices. Secondly, the paper originally builds on the existing quantitative literature on politico-diplomatic relations between African countries and external partners – which mostly focuses on size of diplomatic networks, frequency of high-level visits, voting alignments at the UN, and the likes – by showing how examining data on bilateral agreements can fruitfully add to our understanding of inter-state relations. Our findings contribute to the literature on middle powers’ foreign policies by showing that economic and development priorities have been Italy’s major drivers, and also represent relevant considerations for the activation of the African partner. These dynamics were also shaped by the time when African states became independent and by the distribution of Italian embassies, while institutional and political factors influenced the intensity of the diplomatic activity but not its timing.

Carbone, G., Giuliani, M and Chignoli, M. (2026). Italy’s Bilateral Agreements with Sub-Saharan Countries: A Quantitative Exploration of  Intensity, Timing and  Drivers, in Rivista Italiana di Politiche pubbliche, n. 1 (forthcoming).

Online appendix

It is well known that economic downturns tend to increase electoral volatility—both by amplifying the punishment of incumbent parties and encouraging vote-switching, as well as by boosting support for new parties. 
However, can models of democracy and institutional arrangements moderate this effect?

This is the question that Chiara Tura and Leonardo Serri explored while completing their group project for my Bachelor’s IPLE course in Comparative Political Systems.

Their answer is YES. While models of democracy do not directly affect electoral volatility, consensus-based institutions typically mitigate the impact of economic crises on electoral instability. 

You can read their paper here.

Policy reforms are often unique, in the sense that it is hard to find comparable changes and circumstances that would make it possible to clearly identify their net consequences and thus unambiguously support causality attributions. Without the appropriate counterfactuals, there is no way scholars can avoid the uncertainty of their estimates. However, we should accept the causal complexity that characterizes social science, give up on the idea of a model’s precision, and increase the robustness of our empirical evidence through multiple testing. This is the research strategy that we adopted in evaluating a reform in the mobility policy of the municipality of Milan, in Italy, which cannot easily be compared to other policy changes. Overall, we found evidence of the direct and indirect effects of the policy reform. However, the research design helped us refine some of our original expectations and fine-tune the underlying mechanisms. This project uses the proposed case study to emphasize the methodological importance of evaluating any policy change using redundant and robust empirical evidence – even accepting some degree of indeterminacy –rather than relying on isolated positive findings.

Marco Giuliani (2025). Post hoc, propter hoc? Counterfactuals, placebos, and spillovers in evaluating a local mobility policy. International Review of Public Policy, (7)2