A steadily increasing number of European countries recently adopted their own ‘Africa policies’. The temporal and geographical clustering of such plans suggests that a policy diffusion process might have been at play, with the introduction and the shape of a policy in a given country being influenced by those of other countries. This paper tests the policy diffusion hypothesis through an in-depth analysis of the case of Italy, a country that in recent times stepped up substantially its engagement with sub-Saharan Africa. Tracing the origins and features of Rome's policy towards the region, however, shows that external influences were much more limited than expected. It was primarily two country-specific drivers – namely, the enduring effects of the European debt crisis on the Italian economy and a sudden and massive, if temporary, increase in irregular migration – which pushed Italy towards Africa and shaped its approach. The paper thus sheds light on how the marked resemblance of policies almost contemporaneously adopted by distinct EU member states – that is, a tight succession and a highly interconnected environment strongly pointing at cross-country influences – can hide motives and processes that are actually highly specific to each of them and essentially by-pass policy diffusion dynamics.

The National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) adopted in 2021 by the Italian government is explicitly committed to push the country towards a ‘radical ecological transition’ and sustainable development. However, the institutionalization of the paradigm of sustainable development, in Italy, is a story of a failure. The aim of this contribution is to investigate the hows and whys that may help explaining the failed institutionalization of the paradigm. By combining an ideational approach with a political system perspective, our empirical investigation analyses the initiatives promoted by Italian national governments, by covering a time span of over 20 years (1992–2020). Thick historical description and process tracing are used to provide an in-depth reconstruction of the process. Our results show that adverse combinations of factors of a cognitive, institutional and political nature have hindered the adoption of substantive policy outcomes, thus leading the institutionalization of the paradigm along a disjointed path.

This article focuses on how the 20 main Italian interest groups evaluated the contents of the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). In comparing its two versions (Conte Draft and Draghi Plan), we want to understand whether the change of government impacted on the contents of the NRRP and, in turn, on interest groups' preference attainment. To do so, we coded around 800 public statements following a multi-media approach. Interest groups' general appraisal for the NRRP grew with the change of government, while business groups greatly increased their degree of preference attainment. This within-case longitudinal comparison assesses the importance of governments' partisan composition to account for interest groups' success in the policymaking.

This study aims to unpack the mobilization of emotions in the political discourse of populist and non-populist parties and above all, across ‘varieties of populism’ (right wing vs. left wing or hybrid). Is there an empirical connection between emotions and populism? Are all types of populisms alike with regards to the emotional appeals within their political discourse? Focusing on Italy as a crucial case for populist communication and using a novel methodological approach based on supervised machine learning, it systematically investigates the intensity and trends of specific emotions in political discourses (institutional and informal, i.e. leaders’ speeches) of all Italian political parties over the last 20 years, for a corpus of more than 13,000 sentences analysed. The findings confirm that (i) populists tend to use more (and a broader repertoire of) emotional appeals than non-populist parties; however (ii) overall, there is an increase in the use of these appeals in the Italian political party discourse over time, especially in terms of negative emotions; and, most importantly, (iii) different types of emotions are mobilized by different types of populisms. Right wing populism mainly uses negative emotions while left wing or hybrid populism employs positive emotional appeals. The communication arena (party manifestoes vs. speeches) nevertheless does matter in the degree and types of emotions mobilized by political actors. This study identifies important implications for research on emotional appeals in politics, populist communication and political campaigning, and populist contagion from an emotion-based perspective.

The European Union (EU) has reacted to the migration crises of the last decade with growing externalization of migration management to neighbor countries often accused of not respecting human rights and individual liberties. Focusing on EU cooperation with the Southern neighborhood, as defined within the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) framework, this paper investigates the recent developments in the EU's external migration policies, demonstrating that there is a gap between EU discourses and policy instruments identified by the EU as strategic tools of the European migration and asylum policy (MAP). Five Southern neighbor countries (SNCs) have been selected, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, to assess the extent to which the EU, when cooperating on migration and asylum issues, places international protection at risk instead of playing the role of humanitarian actor in accordance with the ideals and principles it defends. The research critically analyzes the EU's cooperation with SNCs concerning migration, as developed via international agreements, action plans, and mobility partnerships under the umbrella of the ENP. In particular, it explores the incompatibility between the European MAP instruments and international protection. MAP, the qualitative analysis shows, represents a clear mismatch between EU talk and action, outlining another case of organized hypocrisy.

Data systematically depict women as less knowledgeable, interested, and apt to provide a valid answer to questions about politics. These three gaps – the knowledge, the political interest, and the expression of knowledge gap – are related to a discriminatory way of measuring political knowledge and interest, which conceptually juxtaposes the more general concept of knowledge and interest in politics to that of knowing about, or taking an interest in, political institutions. This narrows the measurement to topics that men are more interested in. In this experimental study, the focus is shifted from political institutions to a wider understanding of what can be a political issue. It reveals that women's knowledge disadvantage and hesitancy in answering to knowledge questions, together with men's higher levels of interest, are most likely conditional to this traditional interpretation of the term politics.