This article explores Italian voters’ perception of pre-election polls and the latter’s influence on voter choice. Approximately 900 voters were asked to participate in an online simulated election campaign implemented within the voting decision model developed by Richard Lau and David Redlawsk. Voters were given access to, among other heuristics, pre-election polls; a subset of voters was also exposed to polls predicting the final outcome. Findings concern voters’ perceptions of pre-election polls’ reliability and usefulness and the impact of polls on voters after they have viewed survey findings suggesting that their preferred candidates will lose. On the whole, voters participating in the simulated election campaign displayed somewhat negative attitudes towards pre-election polls: such polls, more often than not, were deemed useless and unreliable. As regards the part of the study in which some voters were forcibly exposed to polls that reported unfavourable predictions for their preferred candidates, only one-tenth of voters switched votes: not many, if one considers that such voters had a good incentive to switch, but often more than enough to decide an election.

We consider the effect of primary elections on party membership and electoral behaviour. Direct democracy instruments trigger significant changes in the role and behaviour of grassroots members. The case of the Italian centre-left parties, and particularly the Democratic Party, is in this sense relevant, as for over a decade these parties have been reaching out to supporters in order to include them into decision-making processes, such as the selection of party leaders and candidates to legislative and executive offices. The distinction between members and supporters has blurred. The article focuses on voting behaviour and party attachment of three different groups of primary voters – namely, party members, supporters, and external voters. What is the difference between these three groups with regard to voting behaviour and motivations in primary elections? And what is the difference with regard to voting intentions in general elections? We examine these issues using original survey data collected in 2012 during the centre-left coalition’s primary elections. We highlight the consequences of the differences between members and supporters with regard to their voting behaviour and motivations.

This article has the purpose to assess if and how party system nationalization affects individual voting behaviour. Previous studies on party system nationalization have focused on systemic processes, exclusively dealing with aggregate data. The authors address this topic from a new empirical perspective, arguing that party system nationalization could act as a context dimension interacting with the vote choice function. How does this specific context dimension moderate the explanatory power of individual-level characteristics? On which determinants of vote choice does party system nationalization have a greater impact? To answer these questions, the authors focus on 23 European countries through the use of the 2009 European Election Study. The empirical analysis shows that in nationalized contexts the impact of the left-right dimension on party support is higher than in territorialized contexts, whereas that of class as well as of culture-related variables is lower. The authors also discuss the implications of these findings.

Public attitudes are greatly shaped by the cohesiveness of the strategic narratives crafted by policy-makers in framing the national involvement in war. The literature has recently devoted growing attention toward the features that define successful strategic narratives, such as a consistent set of objectives, convincing cause–effect chains, as well as credible promises of success. This paper provides an original framework for ‘effective strategic narratives’ for the case of Italy. The military operations undertaken by Italian armed forces in Iraq, Lebanon, and Libya represent the cases through which the framework is assessed. Drawing on content and discourse analysis of political debates and data provided by public opinion surveys, this paper explores the nature of the strategic narratives and their effectiveness.

Gender and race biases persist in western democracies, with male and white candidates still being the norm. Voters may be more inclined to express sexist and racist attitudes in countries with a traditionally male-dominated political system and a majority-white population. As sexism and racism are notoriously difficult to document, and because many people are unaware of their biases toward social groups, we bypass conventional survey measurement and observe voters’ willingness to support candidates whose physical features have been manipulated to make them appear more prototypically feminine or non-white. We implemented this approach in the context of the 2013 Italian election, by presenting a national sample of Italian voters with pictures of male and female parliamentary candidates – both unknown and well known. Overall, we found no main effects of gender or race bias in political judgment. For Italian voters, party cues are by far the most powerful indicators of out-group status, and therefore the strongest predictors of candidate perception and support. This result may be of particular interest to other political contexts characterized by strong partisan polarization.

The discipline of International Relations (IR) for a long time of its history has developed in the form of Great Debates that involved competing paradigms and schools. More recently, it has been described as a cacophony of voices unable to communicate among themselves, but also incapable to provide keys to understand an ever more complex reality. This collection aims at evaluating the heuristic value of a selection of traditional paradigms (realism and liberalism), schools (constructivism), and subdisciplines (security studies and international political economy) so as to assess the challenges before IR theory today and the ability of the discipline to provide tools to make the changed world still intelligible.

Corruption is deviant behaviour from legal and social norms, observable in both dictatorships and democracies, and salient in different periods of the history of mankind. Studying corruption in dictatorships is particularly challenging due to the fact that freedom of expression is censored and there is little (if any) reliable information about the enforcement of legal provisions. This article provides a contribution to the growing literature on the role of legislatures in dictatorships by focusing on parliamentary debates on corruption as a discourse control mechanism. The case of the Portuguese legislature during the Estado Novo is paradigmatic in that regard. The National Assembly, as it will be demonstrated in this article, was able to shift the debate on corruption from the legal to the moral dimension and, thus, deprive citizens, and in particular the opposition, of objective standards to hold regime elites accountable for their misconduct.

The question of who wins or loses in the policy process lies at the heart of recent research into both interest groups and public policy. However, one of the most difficult challenges when empirically analysing interest groups consists in knowing exactly how to measure their influence: despite the fact that this question has been addressed by political scientists for decades, significant problems remain regarding both the conceptual definition and empirical measurement of influence. In order to develop a better understanding of interest group influence, I recommend as follows: (a) that such influence be conceptualized as a degree of preference attainment; (b) that the degree of generality of the concept be downgraded, by breaking it up on the basis of two fundamental dimensions: the lobbying direction (pro-status quo or anti-status quo) and the policy-making stage (agenda setting; decision making; implementation); (c) to proceed with a manual hand-coding in order to obtain a list of the policy issues around which interest groups lobby; (d) to resort to an expert survey in order to evaluate these issues. This methodological approach is used to empirically measure the influence that Italy’s professional orders had on the liberalization process championed by the second Prodi government in 2006.

In the recent past, attitudes towards the EU have become problematic in many member states. Even those countries that traditionally were more optimistic have actually experienced important declines in their popular backing of the European integration process. We examine the public attitudes towards the EU that have recently emerged in Italy, a country where support for EU membership has declined substantially. Making use of recent data and novel research techniques, the article sheds light on the explanatory power of different theoretical perspectives to explain these attitudes. Utilitarianism has emerged as the key explanatory factor, whereas other theories appear much less relevant in the Italian context.