Abstract Despite extensive research, the concept of issue salience remains fragmented across public opinion, party competition, and media studies. This article addresses this gap by proposing a triadic framework that integrates citizens, parties, and media within a single model of interaction. Salience is defined as an attribute of issues – a measure of their relative importance within systems of collective attention – and explained as the outcome of reciprocal processes of supply, demand, and mediation. The framework bridges disciplinary approaches and clarifies how salience circulates through feedback loops connecting the three spheres. By reconceptualizing salience as a dynamic and relational mechanism, the paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how democracies construct, contest, and sustain collective attention in hybrid information environments.
Many people around the globe, including in Europe, have been recently affected by various global crises. In the last 20 years, Europe has experienced the financial crisis, the refugee crisis, COVID-19, increasing extreme weather events associated with climate change, and the breakout of a new war between Russia and Ukraine. This exacerbation of crises has brought increasing scholarly attention to the ‘politics of crises.’ Scholars in political science have examined the politics of crises across a range of domains, such as energy (e.g. Aklin and Urpelainen, 2013; Hancock and Allison, 2020; Bayer et al. , 2025), finance (e.g. Mosley and Singer, 2009; Walter, 2013; Pepinsky, 2014; Copelovitch and Singer, 2020), pandemics (e.g. Worsnop, 2017; Youde, 2018), and migration (e.g. Rudolph, 2003; Hopkins, 2010).
Italy has long been a textbook case of government instability. Against this backdrop, the exceptional longevity of the Meloni government marks a clear reversal. However, the cabinet is ruling under the same institutional constraints that once made Italian governments short-lived and fragile. In this study, I seek to make sense of this exceptional stability tracing how potential stabilizing mechanisms have jointly operated across all the stages of the coalition life-cycle framework. Stability, I argue, has resulted from the convergence of multiple stabilizing mechanisms that have seldom aligned simultaneously in the Italian context. The main lesson from this deviant case lies in a paradox: Italy's most durable government in decades is promoting a constitutional reform intended to enhance stability, even though cohesive and disciplined coalitions can already achieve it without altering institutional rules.
Numerous experts and activists placed hope in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer to reignite the conversation of nuclear disarmament and arms control. However, evidence on the persuasive effects on popular media is mixed, and studies estimating such causal effects are scarce. We draw on narrative persuasion literature to underpin the disarmament and arms control communities' expectations of the Oppenheimer movie's impact with regards to various dimensions of nuclear disarmament and arms control. Leveraging nationally representative survey data from Italy both before and after the movie's release, we first show that younger respondents, men, and those with higher education were more likely to see the movie. Using inverse probability weighting, propensity score matching, and difference-in-difference methods, we then correct for these biases and find qualified evidence that watching the movie increased support for nuclear arms control. At the same time, the movie did not move attitudes towards unilateral nuclear disarmament, opposition to proliferation, or opposition to nuclear weapons use. Beyond sparking the conversation about the dangers of nuclear weapons, the movie did not appear to have shifted public attitudes in the direction of broader disarmament goals. Our findings not only shed light on the persuasive effects of the Oppenheimer movie and popular media more broadly, but further contribute to our understanding of public views regarding nuclear disarmament and arms control.
Since May 2022, activists in many countries have been protesting, targeting artworks in famous museums and squares, capturing the attention of citizens, media, and authorities. This new wave of protests was not immune to criticism from bystanders, media, and public institutions. Some governments issued legislation to specifically sanction climate activists who target cultural heritage. Hence, the question arises as to how exposure to such protests affects citizens' attitudes and behaviors toward the environment. To address that question, this study relies on two original datasets. First, a data collection of all instances of climate protests targeting artwork that occurred from May 2022 to August 2024. Second, an original pre-registered survey experiment (n approximate to 1,000), conducted in August-September 2024 in Italy, where the highest concentrations of such acts of protest were recorded. This paper examines whether exposure to climate protests targeting artwork negatively impacts public opinion levels of environmental concern, pro-environmental voting, and pro-environmental behavior. The results suggest that public opinion does not endorse climate protests targeting artwork, but exposure to them has no meaningful causal effect on their stances on environmental protection.
Within 18 months of its second consecutive general election (March 2018) as Italy's largest party, the valence populist 5-Star Movement (M5S) had dropped to polling 4th, halving its 30% + vote-share, behind parties of both the right and the left. In those 18-months, the party participated in two governments: one of the right and one of the centre-left. Two broad explanations for such decline are presented here: party credibility loss related to its (non)-ideological placement and penalties associated with incumbency. The former is predicted to lead those who initially supported the party to disengage from party preferences while the later is predicted to have respondents desert their preference for M5S to other parties. Using Italian panel survey data on partisan representation from March 2018 through September 2020, this manuscript identifies the opinions of those who those who deserted the party, those who disengaged from party preferences, and those who remained loyal to M5S. Descriptive analysis will first call attention to the differences between loyalists, deserters, the disengaged, and survey respondents more broadly. Multivariate analysis suggests the role of incumbency-based factors as an explanation for a decline in party support. The ideological position of the party (or being beyond left-and-right) had only a minor role. A discussion then focuses on the results of populists in power and the role of ideology in valence populism. Without an ideological core, once in power, voters punish (valence) populist party as they would any other, holding them to account for leadership and government performance.
Political misinformation represents a challenge to contemporary democracies. It is widely acknowledged that misinformation is not only spread by individual users on social media, but also by politicians employing both digital and legacy media to disseminate biased or misleading content to advance their political agendas. This study explores the mechanisms through which misinformed statements made by politicians influence public opinion and examines the effectiveness of corrections from academic/official sources or fact-checking websites, also focusing on the role of partisanship. We investigate whether agreement with a misinformed statement on key policy issues - minimum wage, COVID-19 vaccination, and working hours - increases when it is attributed to a politician, and whether corrections by academic/official sources or fact-checkers reduce agreement. Through survey experiments conducted in Italy, we find that while misinformation from politicians does not always affect agreement with false statements, corrections generally decrease agreement. However, partisanship plays a crucial role, with individuals more likely to resist correction when misinformation comes from politicians they have more positive feelings toward. These findings shed light on the complex relationship between misinformation, the effectiveness of corrective messages, and political identity in shaping public opinion.
Political ideology has regained prominence in political science and psychology. On the one hand, most of the literature recognizes that ideology is not characterized by a single dimension. On the other hand, recent scholarship has returned to Converse's classic conceptualization of ideology as a belief system: a network of interconnected political beliefs. Using survey data collected after the 2022 Italian general elections, I examine the dimensionality of political attitudes and compare latent and network conceptualizations. Results confirm that Italian political attitudes are bidimensional, and that a partial correlation network model captures their structure very well. I then apply Correlational Class Analysis to identify three distinct belief system types. Political orientations (left-right self-placement and vote) emerge as the strongest individual-level predictors of class membership. I explain these findings through an extension of Converse's theory: while he argued that belief systems primarily vary in tightness (internal consistency), I show that conflicting partisan cues might foster low belief consensus: disagreement over which attitudes should be held together.
How do Euroskeptic parties adjust their rhetoric when the European Union expands its fiscal and redistributive role? We address this question by examining the impact of the next-generation EU (NGEU) program on parliamentary debates in Italy, the largest beneficiary of EU recovery funds. Drawing on an original dataset of over 700 hand-coded parliamentary statements covering 30 debates in the Italian Chamber of Deputies (2018-2024), we show that the launch of NGEU coincided with a measurable increase in supportive rhetoric toward the EU, especially among parties with Euroskeptic profiles, a shift that is not solely attributable to changes in government status. Our findings suggest that EU-level redistributive policies can contribute to altering, at least temporarily, domestic party discourse in parliament, pointing to the domestic political relevance of fiscal integration
This research note challenges the utility of the "far right" label, which groups together the extreme right and the (populist) radical right, for the study of contemporary European party systems. It argues that while extreme right parties are typically consistent with the traditional conceptualization of anti-system parties, those belonging to the (populist) radical right increasingly experience a pattern of integration without substantive ideological moderation - i.e. negative integration - which challenges the Sartorian conceptualization. Nevertheless, Sartori's idea of disjointed space, which separates via "no coalition" points the parties that are perceived to be illegitimate players in the party system from the others, remains essential to understanding the diverging trends that characterize the extreme right and the (populist) radical right today as well as the cases that deviate from the typical pattern. The notion of disjointed space accounts for the qualitative difference between the actors that are perceived to be suitable for coalitions by the more traditional mainstream parties and, ultimately, allows us to understand why (populist) radical right parties are often integrated in party systems, while those of the extreme right are not. The analysis invites scholars to use the most precise term whenever possible rather than vaguely referring to the "far right," as it overlooks key differences from a party system perspective. Notably, although nativist and authoritarian ideas increasingly permeate public debate, when it comes to political parties, it is more accurate to speak of the mainstreaming of the (populist) radical right rather than of the "far right" as a whole.
Despite a long tradition of research on dominant party systems (DPS), comparative analysis remains limited by conceptual ambiguities, regional and historical biases, and the absence of accessible data. This research note introduces the Global Dominant Party Systems (GDPS) Dataset, which includes 187 cases of executive dominance across 106 independent countries from 1900 to 2024, addressing the regional and historical biases that have traditionally plagued the literature. Drawing on foundational theories and refined concepts, the dataset differentiates between dominant parties and DPS and develops the minimal definition of DPS that focuses on executive arena and at least minimally contested elections. The dataset identifies cases with mechanical properties typical of DPS, that is those in which one party (or coalition) consistently monopolizes executive power and electoral competition fails to produce changes in government leadership. Despite setting permissive minimal criteria, the dataset also offers a broad range of variables on democracy, corruption and institutional features which can be used to set different criteria for case selection and conduct robustness checks. The dataset also includes variables on ethnic and opposition fragmentation, voter turnout, economy and population size, enabling researchers to investigate the institutional and socio-economic foundations of dominance across regime types and world regions. Finally, the proposed model of DPS evolution and change can serve as a useful guide for qualitative research on unpacking causal mechanisms. While limited to positive cases of dominance, the dataset offers new potential for cross-regional hypothesis testing and theory development on executive power, party system change, and democratic resilience.
The relationship between parliaments and governments during the Covid-19 pandemic has been closely examined by various disciplines, which have typically analysed data on the laws and procedures enforced to manage the emergency. This literature generally agrees that the government dominated the management of the pandemic, often at the expense of parliamentary prerogatives. However, such data may not be sufficiently detailed to fully grasp some nuances. Above all, they may provide limited information on the factors that influenced the balance of powers between the two institutions. This article focuses on the Italian case. It complements data on legislation with the findings of semi-structured interviews conducted with members of parliament and government, as well as high-ranking bureaucrats, to gain a more in-depth understanding of these processes. The data on legislation suggest that governmental dominance was strong at every stage of the emergency, although parliament slightly regained some prerogatives over time. This recovery began under Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, but it became more pronounced under Mario Draghi. The acquisition of knowledge about the pandemic was perceived by several interviewees as a factor that helped parliament regain some control, making it a possible outcome of a policy learning process. However, other factors also emerged as significant, such as the direct role of the prime ministers in strengthening the role of the executive and the difficulties of the technocratic members of the government in navigating parliamentary dynamics during Draghi's tenure.
This article was submitted to the 'The Legacy of Giovanni Sartori' symposium on IPSR/RISP - Italian Political Science Review. The goal of this note is to suggest an alternative approach to the of party family. The literature agrees that individual party families should be ideologically distinct and cohesive but maintains a broad understanding of 'ideology'. This comes with conceptual and operational complications, including rarely explicit definitions of party family and frequently inconclusive empirical evidence. Instead, I suggest that the historically rooted ideological distinctiveness and uniqueness of party families should be conceived at the issue level. Accordingly, an alternative conceptualisation of party family is proposed: groups of parties whose patterns of issue salience ideologically reflect their historical origins. Importantly, this approach revolves around the identification of party families' core issues, based on their cleavage/historical origins. Parties belonging to a party family will be the most consistent emphasizers of their core issues within their party system. This note provides a first discussion of how this alternative approach may provide party family scholars with greater clarity, both conceptually and in proposed empirical applications.
Party system classifications have been central in political science, especially until Sartori's influential typology in 1976. However, recent years have seen diminished attention to such classifications. Western European party systems have significantly transformed, particularly over the last 15 years due to multiple crises, affecting their core structure, or what Sartori termed 'patterns of interparty competition.' This raises questions about whether these changes have undermined the very concept of systemness, making classifications irrelevant. This research note redefines party systems based on the number and composition of relevant political poles (governing alternatives) and, through a long-term analysis of Western Europe (20 countries since 1945), assesses their degree of systemness. Results indicate that many systems have become 'non-systems,' with fluctuating and unstable party poles. Most Western European systems have exhibited this 'non-system' type for at least half of legislatures since 1989, thus making classifications only short-lived snapshots and inevitably useless for long-term accounts.
This research note traces the evolution of Sartori's theoretical reflection on the party system, primarily by describing the relationship between "format and mechanics" to assess its explanatory power. The main conclusion of the analysis is that Sartori's framework has all the elements of an empirical party system theory. A systemic theory of party relations does not have to explain party behaviour but only the combined effect, in terms of the system's mechanics, of all party actions. Thus, the theory states that the number of parties and their positioning in the unidimensional competitive space cause the system's mechanics. The dependent variable is ordinal, about the quantitative and qualitative distribution of power among the parties. This detracts from the parsimony of the theory and requires other independent or at least intervening variables besides the number of parties: ideological distance and direction of competition. This difference notwithstanding, we can still accept Sartori's framework as a general party system theory. Appropriate mid or lower-range theories could supplement the general one in explaining sub-systemic phenomena. Irrespective of whether we call it a classification, a framework or a theory, Sartori's contribution remains a fundamental milestone in the study of parties and party systems.
Almost 50 years have passed since Sartori introduced to the world one of the most famous innovations in the history of political science: a new party systems typology. Despite many criticisms and refinements since then, Sartori's typology still constitutes, as stated by Peter Mair in 1990, "the most effective and exhaustive framework within which to contrast the properties of different party systems". In the current research note, and taking into consideration that previous typologies have not yet been that successful, we propose a new classification of party systems - which not only embeds the notion of polarization into the typology, but also allows us to populate the "polarized pluralist" type beyond Sartori's "centre-based" (Italian) model - in Asia, a continent almost completely ignored by Sartori in his seminal work. Using an original dataset that includes the most important characteristics of party systems in the region and building on Sartori's original conceptualization, we examine to what extent party systems in Asian democracies, both contemporary (Bhutan, East Timor, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Taiwan) and historical (Bangladesh 1991-2006, Kyrgyzstan 2010-2020, Myanmar 2015-2020 and Thailand 1992-2013), have changed. Our discussion of a new party system typology is particularly relevant and important to Asia, as its many new democracies still need to shift from plurality electoral rules adopted during the early post-independence periods to more mature, power-dispersing political institutions that accommodate their rich ethnic and religious diversity, as it happened in Europe after the World Wars.
