Category: politics

Nella tavolta rotonda dedicata ai “Cento anni di Giovanni Sartori” al convegno della Società Italiana di Scienza Politica (Trieste, 12-14 settembre 2024), ho tenuto questo intervento:

Perché non possiamo non dirci…

At the roundtable dedicated to ‘One Hundred Years of Giovanni Sartori’ at the conference of the Italian Society of Political Science (Trieste, 12-14 September 2024), I gave the speech linked above.

An English version has been published as Marco Giuliani (2025). Why We Can’t Help but Call Ourselves (All) ‘Sartorians’, Italian Political Science

The Council of the European Union is considered to be ‘a consensus machine’. Yet, disagreements still happen at the voting stage, with abstentions, oppositions, and statements defining the positions of national delegations even at the end of long bargaining processes. 

This article explores the behaviours of Italian representatives in the Council from 1995 to 2019. The analysis uses roll call data to test expectations emerging from the previous comparative literature in the context of this more demanding single-country research design. Amongst the hypotheses, the results confirm that chairing the Council, and the partisanship of governments on the ideological and EU integration dimensions, are systematically associated with various ways in which opposition and dissent are expressed. Furthermore, we find that caretaker cabinets and government heterogeneity also reduce the likelihood of Italian disagreements in the Council.

 Marco Giuliani (2024). Italy in the Council of the European Union: votes and statements, Contemporary Italian Politics, 18(3): 301-320.

The article analyses the 15 elections that took place between 2010 and 2019 in four South European countries – Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain – through the lenses of the retrospective vote theory. 

The large within-country variation of economic conditions justifies the adoption of an original subnational perspective, while the explicit test of alternative economic quantities and horizons provides a more credible assessment of voters’ behaviours. 

Besides offering a taxonomy of local retrospective voting, the research found that citizens assessed the incumbents against regional unemployment levels and national growth dynamics, further benchmarking the local economic conditions against their past performances. These results give credit to the idea that the South European electorate shares similar references in assessing the economic competences of incumbent governments.

 Marco Giuliani (2022) Absolute and benchmarked economic voting. A subnational perspective on a decade of elections in Southern Europe, South European Society and Politics, 27(2): 279–303, DOI: 10.1080/13608746.2023.2202468