Italian Political Science Review-Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica最新文献

{"title":"Unity in fragility: nonviolence and COVID-19","authors":"Roberto Baldoli, C. Radaelli","doi":"10.1017/ipo.2021.38","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ipo.2021.38","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic witnessed extreme forms of biopolitics, as well as the urgency to reconsider our relationship with the planet. Although biopolitics draws attention to the technologies of domination by public authorities, we cast the concepts of bios and politics in the wider framework of nonviolence. In this framework, bios is the set of practices (praxis) of ordinary citizens. And politics is power created by harm reduction, or actions in daily life that testimony the desire not to harm others or the planet. We leverage nonviolence at three levels, scaling up from the individual to social behaviour and to the planet. The first level concerns nonviolence as self-sufferance and as praxis to claim back the sovereignty of the body. In the second level, nonviolence is collective mobilization – building social capital, self-governance, and solidarity. The third level provides the vision of a diverse ecological citizenship with a sustainable relationship between human beings and the planet.","PeriodicalId":43368,"journal":{"name":"Italian Political Science Review-Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica","volume":"52 1","pages":"378 - 390"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42599153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Digital Citizen(ship). Politics and Democracy in the Networked Society By Luigi Ceccarini. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021. 200p. £75.00 (hardcover)","authors":"Davide Vittori","doi":"10.1017/ipo.2021.33","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ipo.2021.33","url":null,"abstract":"The Digital Citizen(ship) (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021) by Luigi Ceccarini is a timely and informative book. As internet is now a potential instrument of active citizenship (p. 152), Ceccarini reflects on the opportunities (and the risks) connected with this instrument for the society at large. The importance of discussing the impact of the digitalization process is testified by its spread in the world. The data provided by Ceccarini (p. 22) show how relevant internet is and also its potential in non-Western areas such as Asia and Africa, where only 55.1 and 39.3% of the population uses it, compared, for example, to the 94.6% in North America or the 87.2% in Europe. The growth in the internet usage has been accompanied by the diffusion of social networks, which in few years became the most relevant media companies in the Western World and whose owners are now global political players. In particular, what Ceccarini highlights is that the digital citizens, despite the information abundance that charac-terizes the internet era, have relatively few alternatives when it comes to social networks, whose market concentration is very similar to a monopoly. In 2009, there were 17 leading social networks in each country considered, in 2017 the figure had fallen to five (p. 24). Despite this concentration, in chapter 6 Ceccarini shows that, unsurprisingly, social network users in Europe went from 18% in 2018 to 48% in 2019, meaning that digitalization has heavily affected daily habits of citizens. Yet, social networks are not merely entertaining tools. Social networks and websites in very few years almost reached television among the most relevant sources of information among European citizens. The gap between television (82%) and social networks and websites (41%) was more than 40% points in 2014 and it has reduced to 14","PeriodicalId":43368,"journal":{"name":"Italian Political Science Review-Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica","volume":"52 1","pages":"273 - 274"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48935654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The rise of China between Global IR and area studies: an agenda for cooperation","authors":"M. Dian","doi":"10.1017/ipo.2021.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ipo.2021.31","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract East Asia is increasingly at the centre of debates among International Relations (IR) scholars. China's political, economic, and military ascendency is increasingly considered as a crucial test case for main approaches to IR. Despite this renewed attention, mainstream theories employed to analyse contemporary Asia are still remarkably Euro-centric. A wave of studies has argued in favour of a broad ‘decolonization’ of theoretical concepts used to analyse East Asia as well as other regions. These efforts have produced several distinct research agendas. Firstly, critical and post-colonial theorists have worked on the par destruens, highlighting the inherent Euro-centrism of many IR concepts and theories. Secondly, scholars such as Buzan and Acharya have promoted the idea of Global IR, seeking to advance a ‘non-Western’ and non-Euro-centric research agenda. This agenda has found fertile ground especially in China, where several scholars have tried to promote a Chinese School of IR. This article has three main purposes. Firstly, it briefly explores the issue of Eurocentrism in IR studies dedicated to East Asia. Secondly, it maps the theoretical debates aimed at overcoming it, looking in particular at the ‘Global IR’ research programme and the so-called Chinese School. Finally, it sketches a few other possible avenues of research for a very much needed cooperation between Global IR and area studies.","PeriodicalId":43368,"journal":{"name":"Italian Political Science Review-Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica","volume":"52 1","pages":"252 - 267"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43100138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Masks of the Political God: Religion and Political Parties in Contemporary Democracies. Luca Ozzano. Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: ECPR Press, Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. 276 p. $120.00 cloth","authors":"Alar Kilp","doi":"10.1017/ipo.2021.32","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ipo.2021.32","url":null,"abstract":"The Masks of the Political God is a unique contribution by professor of political science Luca Ozzano to studies of religion in party politics. The added value of this important contribution resides in the combination of three aspects: its case selection covers main world religions; it relies analytically on five types of religiously oriented parties proposed by the author in his earlier publications; it studies comparatively religion-related political cleavages during four decades since 1980. No previous study has combined these three elements. Comparative studies with cases from world religions have focused on other themes (e.g. Mark Juergensmeyer ’ s books The New Cold War and Terror in the Mind of God on worldwide rise of religious nationalism and religious terrorism). Comparative studies on religion in party politics have been limited to selected geographic/cultural regions and have mostly used theoretical frameworks (e.g. populism, nationalism) that do not tackle the question of religion in party politics as straightforwardly and comprehensively as does this volume. The book starts with three theoretical chapters. After discussing the study of religion in party politics from perspectives of democracy (Chapter 1) and political cleavages (Chapter 2), it pre-sents the typology of religiously oriented parties (Chapter 3). The author has published widely and is an established expert not only on these themes but is a renowned scholar also of religious fundamentalism and religious populism, both of which constitute important dimensions in this study.","PeriodicalId":43368,"journal":{"name":"Italian Political Science Review-Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica","volume":"52 1","pages":"270 - 272"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47100169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mistrust: Why Losing Faith In Institutions Provides The Tools To Transform Them Ethan Zuckerman. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021. 275pp. $26.95 (hardcover)","authors":"M. Giglioli","doi":"10.1017/ipo.2021.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ipo.2021.30","url":null,"abstract":"An old Jacobin quote, variously attributed to Robespierre or Saint-Just, claims that ‘la méfiance est au sentiment intime de la liberté ce que la jalousie est à l’amour’: this same appraisal of the decisive political importance of mistrust – if not the bellicose affect underlying it – drives the interesting new book by Ethan Zuckerman. The author’s career is a good example of an interdisciplinary trajectory between academia, digital activism, and startup culture. Before his current position at the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Zuckerman was for many years associated with two key institutions in the ‘Cambridge School’ of US internet-and-society scholarship: the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, and the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab (which he left in protest over the Media Lab director’s financial entanglements with Jeffrey Epstein). He has also, through projects such as Global Voices and Geekcorps, been involved in nonprofit work in international development and media pluralism. As for digital innovation, while at tripod.com at the turn of the 21st century he is widely credited with the invention of the pop-up ad. Mistrust begins with the contention that an inflection point has been reached in ordinary citizens’ perception of the trustworthiness of institutions, public and private. Zuckerman perceives the global nature of the crisis, but both the diagnosis and the therapy in the book refer mainly to the American case. This overwhelming systemic mistrust imperils the stability of current political arrangements, leading to a new cleavage, between those the author terms insurrectionists and traditional institutionalists. Such a cleavage is orthogonal to the customary Right–Left one, but it does not cover the entire polity: both insurrectionists and institutionalists share a proactive approach to political life, hence both seek to dispel the feeling of powerlessness and disengagement mistrust engenders. Thus, the book overall can be seen to chart the range of contributions that more or less institution-friendly modes of activism can offer in the fight against political apathy. Structurally, the first three chapters of the volume are devoted to a description of the phenomenon of contemporary mistrust, its causes, and consequences. The remaining six chapters explore different political strategies to counter mistrust and ‘fix’ institutions. Zuckerman remains somewhat agnostic as to the root cause of mistrust: sudden crises, race animosities, neoliberal assaults on government bureaucracy, growing wealth inequality, diffuse political awareness in the broader population are all mentioned as possibilities, but none is singled out as decisive, and ultimately the mere fact of institutional underperformance, as suggested by Pippa Norris, can prove sufficient (2001). Rather more interesting is the discussion of consequences, most notably with regard to the subversion of the value of transpar","PeriodicalId":43368,"journal":{"name":"Italian Political Science Review-Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica","volume":"52 1","pages":"149 - 151"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48034644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Paranoid styles and innumeracy: implications of a conspiracy mindset on Europeans' misperceptions about immigrants","authors":"Sergio Martini, Mattia Guidi, Francesco Olmastroni, Linda Basile, R. Borri, P. Isernia","doi":"10.1017/ipo.2021.26","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ipo.2021.26","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Innumeracy, that is, the inability to deal with numbers and provide correct estimates about political issues, is reported to be widespread among the public. Yet, despite the recognition that a conspiracy mindset is an increasingly common phenomenon in Western democracies, this has not been considered as a potential correlate of innumeracy. Using data from an online sample of respondents across 10 European countries, we show that those with a higher propensity to hold a conspiracy worldview tend to overestimate the actual share of the immigrant population living in their own country. This association holds true when accounting for country heterogeneity and other cognitive, affective and socio-demographic factors. Employing a comparative design and refined measurements, the article contributes to our understanding of how a conspiracy mentality may influence perceptions of relevant political facts, questioning basic processes of democratic accountability.","PeriodicalId":43368,"journal":{"name":"Italian Political Science Review-Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica","volume":"52 1","pages":"66 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/ipo.2021.26","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48047096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Come cambiano gli italiani: Valori e atteggiamenti dagli anni Ottanta a oggi Ferruccio Biolcati, Giancarlo Rovati and Paolo Segatti (eds.), Bologna: Il Mulino, 2020. 352p. €32 (paperback)","authors":"Lorenzo De Sio","doi":"10.1017/ipo.2021.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ipo.2021.29","url":null,"abstract":"In an age characterized by radical electoral change, often leading to disruptive political developments, the whole area of political science that deals with the chain of representation – the one that connects citizens to parties (and governments) through elections – has been seriously challenged. Cleavage theories and ideological understandings that had served us well for decades have been proving less and less useful in recent years, as testified by the proliferation of new frameworks (from ‘populism’ to new cleavages, to issue competition). It is in this difficult and challenging context for our discipline that Come cambiano gli italiani comes with perfect timing, providing a wealth of information (and some potentially controversial interpretations: see below) about the values and attitudes of Italian citizens. Fitting well within the contemporary perspective of political science, that has fully incorporated survey research as one of its most powerful research tools, the book leverages: (1) a pooled dataset of Italian respondents to five waves of European Values Study (EVS)/World Values Survey (WVS) surveys, between 1981 and 2018; (2) an impressive team of contributors, including both senior and junior scholars from various Italian and international universities; (3) leadership by three scholars that – besides being national EVS and WVS coordinators – have led through the years projects such as the Italian National Election Studies and the True European Voter. The book starts (p. 8) by clarifying how all chapters share two essential goals: the first (well captured by the book title) is to provide an effective description of change (across time) of key cultural orientations of Italian respondents; the second (less evident in the title) is to trace a sort of deeper change, i.e. change in the relationships that connect these cultural orientations to other personal characteristics and values. This latter question is just as interesting, such as in the example of how, among younger generations, education is losing is classic role in predicting differences in political interest, so that – against the predictions of cognitive mobilization theory – overall increases in education rates do not lead to overall increases in political interest (Chapter 10). These two goals are systematically pursued across 17 chapters, that give this book unique breadth and reveal its importance for our understanding of contemporary political developments. After a first chapter on structural and demographic change, chapters follow dedicated to attitudes towards: life priorities; work; family; religion; libertarianism and civic attitudes; post-materialism; environment; science; social and political participation; military service; institutions; political leadership; state vs. market; corruption; immigration; social distance and interpersonal trust. All chapters present results in easily accessible form, often using simple tables and charts that compare descriptives or summar","PeriodicalId":43368,"journal":{"name":"Italian Political Science Review-Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica","volume":"52 1","pages":"146 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/ipo.2021.29","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46589275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Where does the Coronavirus come from? On the mechanisms underlying the endorsement of conspiracy theories on the origin of SARS-CoV-2","authors":"C. Vezzoni, G. M. Dotti Sani, A. Chiesi, Riccardo Ladini, Ferruccio Biolcati, S. Guglielmi, N. Maggini, M. Maraffi, F. Molteni, A. Pedrazzani, P. Segatti","doi":"10.1017/ipo.2021.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ipo.2021.19","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While official science has given its answer to the question on the origin of the Coronavirus (animal to human transmission), alternative theories on human creation of the virus – purposely or inadvertently – have flourished. Those alternative theories can be easily located among the family of conspiracy theories, as they always assume some secretive activity of some groups acting on their self-interest and against the good of the many. The article assesses the prevalence of these beliefs during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, studies its development during the pandemic, and investigates its potential determinants. In particular, it analyses the relationship between beliefs in alternative theories on the origin of the virus and political orientation, by arguing that the association cannot be attributed to (politically) motivated reasoning, as the issue has not been highly politicized in the Italian context. Alternatively, the article suggests that the main factor driving beliefs in alternative accounts on the origins of the virus is institutional trust. Political orientation moderates its effects, depending on specific conditions (e.g. cue taking, position of the supported party either in government or opposition), and eventually reinforcing scepticism towards epistemic authorities for those with low trust in institutions. Data come from the ResPOnsE COVID-19 survey, carried out with daily samples from April to July 2020 (N > 15.000) to monitor the development of the Italian public opinion during the Coronavirus pandemic.","PeriodicalId":43368,"journal":{"name":"Italian Political Science Review-Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica","volume":"52 1","pages":"51 - 65"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/ipo.2021.19","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45064182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Capturing causation in political science: the perspective of research design","authors":"L. Curini, A. Damonte","doi":"10.1017/ipo.2021.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ipo.2021.28","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the last decades, ‘research design’ has become a strategic topic across political science. An emerging discourse relies on it to encompass paradigmatic oppositions and cultivate a pluralist approach to causation. As an introduction to the special issue on the topic, we offer an outline of the roles that the discipline recognizes to design in its relation to models and contend that, in a time of fascination for predictors, political science pluralism allows for balancing interpretability and validity of findings at once.","PeriodicalId":43368,"journal":{"name":"Italian Political Science Review-Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica","volume":"51 1","pages":"157 - 163"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42087266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"IPO volume 51 issue 2 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/ipo.2021.34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ipo.2021.34","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43368,"journal":{"name":"Italian Political Science Review-Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica","volume":" ","pages":"f1 - f2"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47313221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}