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.

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.

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.