Green mobility (…kind of)

pharma queu

We have all seen long queues of people waiting to be Covid tested close to pharmacies. It is a sort of by-product of the extended need of the Green Pass for a range of activities. In this note, I tested if  Google mobility data are able to “see” this kind of side effect, further validating their use in the social sciences.

Read it here

Political orientation and COVID-19 stringency index

Stringency index

I asked my IPLE Bachelor’s students from the class in Comparative Political Systems to complete a short research project.
As I did already last year, I host here what I believe to be the class’s best paper.

Niccolò Maria Piccinali, Claudia Di Palma, Linda Coglitore, Luca Perego, and Quynh Nhu Nguyen chose to investigate “The impact of political orientation on the stringency of COVID-19 lockdown measures“.

Links:   Paper;    Cross-country dataset (csv);    Panel dataset (csv)

Twelve Votes for an Exit: Compromise and Responsiveness in the Brexit Process

johnson

Brexit has been at the centre of the last two British elections and the past legislative term. The UK’s exit from the European Union was characterized by a series of parliamentary setbacks, with several government defeats, continuous rebellions and cross-party agreements made to secure control of the agenda. In the research reported in this article, we analyse the parliamentary Brexit process through careful examination of the 12 indicative votes held in Westminster in 2019 to find an alternative solution to Theresa May’s exit agreement. We map the choices of each MP along two relevant dimensions, connecting them to the socioeconomic structure of their constituencies as well as to the preferences expressed in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Moreover, we associate these parliamentary behaviours – and thus MPs’ attitudes towards compromise and responsiveness – to the gains and losses experienced during the subsequent 2019 general election.

Giuliani, M. (2023). Twelve Votes for an Exit: Compromise and Responsiveness in the Brexit Process. Government and Opposition. An International Journal of Comparative Politics, 58(4): 682-701. doi:10.1017/gov.2021.61

Check the dataset and code