Italian Political Science
https://italianpoliticalscience.com/index.php/ips
<p><strong>Italian Political Science (IPS)</strong> is an open-access peer-reviewed quarterly journal dedicated to deepening the understanding of political phenomena relevant for political scientists and a wider public, including journalists, policy-makers, policy analysts, political activists and all those who have an interest in politics.</p> <p>IPS publishes <strong>intellectually stimulating and conceptually rigorous contributions</strong> on all areas relevant to Political science. All articles include a focus on contemporary Italy, either considered as a case-study or in comparative or European perspective.</p> <p>IPS is rated as <strong>"Classe A" Journal for Political Science</strong> (14/A2) in the official ranking of academic journals set up by the Italian Ministry of University and Research and its evaluation agency (ANVUR). This status has been granted retroactively since 2018.</p>Società Italiana di Scienza Politica - Italian Association of Political Scienceen-USItalian Political Science2420-8434A Loss of Purpose? Sartori and the Current State of Political Science
https://italianpoliticalscience.com/index.php/ips/article/view/232
<div class="page" title="Page 1"> <div class="layoutArea"> <div class="column"> <p><span style="font-size: 9.000000pt; font-family: 'AkzidenzGroteskPro'; font-weight: 300;">This article revisits Giovanni Sartori's seminal critique of political science, examining its relevance in the contemporary context. It acknowledges the significant advancements in political science since the early 1990s, particularly in the sophistication of concepts, methods, and data and questions the idea that social sciences can match the 'hard' sciences. Sartori's four identified errors — parochialism, misclassification, degreeism, and conceptual stretching — are critically engaged with, providing a nuanced assessment of their persistence and evolution over time. The article, originally conceived as a lecture for the Annual Congress of the Società Italiana di Scienza Politica, adopts an autobiographical perspective to extend Sartori's critique to broader contemporary issues in political science, advocating for a more constructive approach in addressing these enduring challenges. </span></p> </div> </div> </div>Stathis N. Kalyvas
Copyright (c) 2024 Stathis N. Kalyvas
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2024-03-192024-03-19181113Inclusive Left and exclusive Right? Assessing the foreign policy of irregular migration in Italy
https://italianpoliticalscience.com/index.php/ips/article/view/208
<p class="IPSAbstractText"><span lang="EN-AU">Governments’ political affiliations traditionally exert a tangible influence over a country’s foreign policy. However, does the external dimension of irregular migration change when different governments come to power? And do related foreign policy measures change as well? To answer these questions, this article first reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the influence of political affiliation on migration and foreign policy. Second, it analyses the foreign policy of Italy’s irregular migration governance from 2000 to 2023 inclusive. Third, it draws theoretical and policy implications. With a focus on foreign policy measures, it finds that path dependence favours a broad bipartisanship – a valence issue for the political system – with 10 governments out of 12 adopting restrictive approaches through the use of analogous foreign policy measures. Specifically, it shows that Rome’s great power politics comprises naval deployments in the Mediterranean, leading contributions to related EU initiatives, externalised offshore processing in Libya, a military mission in Niger, strengthened support to Tunisia, and the establishment of a new offshore processing agreement with Albania. Ancillary implications affect: i) migrants’ own insecurity, aggravated by additional obstacles; ii) foreign and security policy, since Italy’s goals of halting irregular flows, increasing repatriations, and deterring traffickers are frustrated; and iii) the potential external applicability of these findings in comparable destination countries. As a result, this novel research contributes to the literature on both irregular migration governance and Italian foreign policy, by shedding light on the bipartisanship of Italy’s migration-related foreign policy.</span></p>Gabriele Abbondanza
Copyright (c) 2023 Gabriele Abbondanza
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2024-03-082024-03-081811433The Cherished Outcast: Italian Foreign Policy Change towards Russia in the Cases of Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), and Ukraine (2022)
https://italianpoliticalscience.com/index.php/ips/article/view/210
<p>Italy used to have a conciliatory approach towards Russia when dealing with international crises, but this outlook changed with the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine. This study aims to explain this puzzle by examining Italy's foreign policy change in response to three Russian conflicts in the post-Soviet space: Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), and Ukraine (2022). In particular, this study analyzes changes in Italy's approach to sanctioning Russia both in terms of substantial and symbolic differences. To explain these changes, the study focuses on three main factors at the international level: Italy's position as a middle power in the international system, the level of economic interdependence between Italy and Russia, and the conflict intensity. By investigating these factors within three case studies, the empirical analysis suggests that Italy's position as a middle power was the main factor defining Italy’s substantial approach to Russia, which was in line with the common EU response to the three Russian conflicts. However, Italy's middle-power position also gave the country room to maneuver its symbolic approaches to Russia, which shifted from a soft approach to a rather hard one throughout the three conflicts. Empirical results indicate that this symbolic shift was mostly caused by a decrease in Italy's economic interdependence with Russia and the heightened intensity of the conflict in Ukraine.</p>Andrei TarasovClaudio Christopher PassalacquaRaffaele Ventura
Copyright (c) 2023 Andrei Tarasov, Claudio Christopher Passalacqua, Raffaele Ventura
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2024-03-012024-03-011813456Democratic backsliding and resilience during a pandemic: the cases of Poland and Italy
https://italianpoliticalscience.com/index.php/ips/article/view/198
<p>We investigate the consequences of the Covid-19 crisis on the quality and survival of democracy in a country. We start from the idea that such crises entail a risk of democratic backsliding, as governments could exploit the state of emergency to concentrate power in their own hands and derogate to democratic rules beyond the realm and past the duration of the emergency. We reconsider this argument and contend that the pandemic’s backsliding effect, if any, depends on the prior quality and consolidation of democratic institutions, the robustness of the state of emergency regulation, and the government’s loyalty to democracy. We analyse Poland and Italy, which were both at risk of ‘pandemic backsliding’ even though for different reasons. While democracy in Italy has proved resilient, we find that backsliding in Poland resulted from a combination of malleable democratic institutions weakened by years of pre-pandemic executive aggrandizement and an authoritarian-leaning government willing to exploit the crisis.</p>Andrea CassaniAngelo PanaroAdam SzymańskiŁukasz Zamęcki
Copyright (c) 2023 Andrea Cassani, Angelo Panaro, Adam Szymański, Łukasz Zamęcki
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2024-02-212024-02-211815777