CONGRIPS Business Meeting at 2016 APSA Annual Conference

Skyline_of_PhiladelphiaThe 2016 Business Meeting of CONGRIPS will take place on Friday 2 September at 18:30-19:30 (Marriott, Room 413). All CONGRIPS members and affiliates are welcome to attend.

The Agenda of the business meeting includes the following headings:

– Budget (and Membership) updates

– Changes to ExCom and other offices

– Website / social media

– 2017 Annual Meeting call for proposals

– Collaboration with PSA and other learned associations

– and, last but not least, the 2016 Life Achievement Award. CONGRIPS assigns this award every two year and this year’s recipient is Professor Gianfranco Pasquino. Professor Pasquino’s acceptance speech can be read from this link: http://goo.gl/GTfvPS

Life Achievement Award 2016: Professor Pasquino’s acceptance speech

GPThe Congrips Life Achievement award came to me, Visiting Professor at Chicago, as a totally unexpected, therefore, even more pleasant and exciting, surprise.

Thank you, dear Colleagues and Friends. I am very grateful.

I do not have to convince you that the study of Italian politics and society can be intellectually stimulating and highly rewarding, though , as citizen of a country that some of you wrongly believe is “normal”, I often feel irritated and annoyed. But I fight back, as you all know, challenging some interpretations, speaking the truth to the powerful as well as to the powerless, attempting, not so naively, to empower the latter, and, of course, also criticizing what many of you have been writing! Hopefully, I have always done so in a scholarly way, engaging in productive conversations, but never ostentatiously showing any kind of detachment. Continue reading “Life Achievement Award 2016: Professor Pasquino’s acceptance speech”

Brexit and Italian politics: parallels, warnings and impacts by A. Giovannini and J. Newell

hqdefaultItalian elites’ traditional esterofilia – the tendency to compare Italy unfavourably with other polities and to look to foreign models for solutions to the country’s political problems – looks very interesting in the aftermath of Brexit. Always held up as a model of political stability, home to a civic culture of which Italians could supposedly only dream, British politics must look very different now, in light of the referendum outcome – as must the quality of British and Italian democracy in relative terms. It seems ironic, considering what has happened, that Anglo-Saxon authors could once write books and articles with such snobbish titles as ‘Republic without government’, ‘Sick man of Europe’, to name just a few, and that these titles could be largely accepted by Italian elites as embodying appropriate judgments of the relative quality of Italy as a democracy. For what the referendum outcome has shown is that British democracy shares all of the problems traditionally seen as supposedly distinguishing features of the Italian case, if anything to a far greater degree. Thereby, it has revealed a number of stark warnings for Italy’s political elites, as well as having had several unwelcome impacts. Continue reading “Brexit and Italian politics: parallels, warnings and impacts by A. Giovannini and J. Newell”

Italian democracy the day after the local elections

As the results of the second round of municipal elections in some amongst Italy’s main cities are known, Professors James Newell and Maurizio Carbone share with CONGRIPS their thoughts on what these results mean for Italy’s democracy (editorial piece for the forthcoming issue of Contemporary Italian Politics)

The day before we began writing this editorial, the results of the second round of the local elections were announced. Although they involved only around one quarter of the Italian electorate and were of the second-order variety, their outcome was widely framed in the media as a significant defeat for Matteo Renzi and therefore to a significant extent were so: in politics, perhaps more than in any other sphere, a situation defined as real is real in its consequences.

Continue reading “Italian democracy the day after the local elections”

Analysis of electoral flows in the recent local elections

The Istituto Cattaneo has just published a brief  analysis of electoral flows in seven Italian cities, examining the flows of votes from the first to second round of the municipal elections of Torino, Bologna, Napoli, Novara, Varese, Grosseto and Brindisi (data for the two main cities, Rome and Milan, is not yet available). The analysis – by Rinaldo Vignati, Pasquale Colloca, Domenico Fruncillo, Michelangelo Gentilini, Mario Marino and Marco Valbruzzi – can be accessed from this link: http://www.cattaneo.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Analisi-Istituto-Cattaneo-Ballottaggi-Comunali-2016-Flussi-elettorali-20.06.16.pdf (in Italian).