This article investigates the relationship between the Italian President of the Republic (PoR) and technocratic governments, focusing on the Monti and Draghi cabinets. We develop the concept of 'presidentialising technocracy' to capture how external shocks and declining partisan capacity transform technocratic cabinets into instruments of presidential authority, and on this basis propose a typology of technocratic governments according to the degree of presidential influence in government formation and policy-making. Empirically, the study combines process tracing of political and institutional crises with Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) of nearly 6000 semantic events (Subject - Verb - Object triplets) extracted from the official diaries of Presidents Napolitano and Mattarella. The findings classify both cabinets as presidential technocratic governments, showing that crises can expand presidential discretion in the cases examined and tend to enable the Head of State to shape formation of the executive and its agenda, as reflected in policy trajectories. In comparative perspective, the Italian case raises the question of whether presidentialised technocracy under crisis conditions should be regarded as an anomaly, an outlier, or an early sign of broader transformations in parliamentary regimes.

We compare the Italian Directors General and Canadian Deputy Ministers' use of time during their average work week using a survey instrument and propose a four-fold categorization of managerial styles. We find that the activities of top executives in the two countries differ, but not dramatically. In particular, we find a very close match in time devoted to 'administrative' tasks and confirm that, in general, these executives have relatively limited time for strategic and long-term planning. The data suggest that 'relational' approaches, which focus on connecting to the personnel of the organization, appear important in how top administrative executives shape their work.

The article analyses the role of the President of the Italian Republic (PoR) as it relates to the process of government formation during the political, economic, and pandemic crises of the last three legislatures. The analysis focuses on the political actions of Giorgio Napolitano and Sergio Mattarella, the two Presidents of the Republic elected (and re-elected) as heads of state during those crises. To explain how the PoR operates when forming a government, the article examines the conditions allowing the functioning of the 'presidential accordion', i.e. the expansion and contraction of the presidential powers in the process of government formation. The presidential accordion hypothesis has been supported by many empirical studies focussing on the role of the PoR in the Italian parliamentary system. The aim of this study is further empirically to test the hypothesis in order to verify whether profound exogenous crises, such as recent economic and pandemic crises, can be considered as independent or intervening variables strengthening or weakening the PoR in the Italian political system.

In this paper, we address the topic of policy actorness in Italian foreign policy to characterize the understudied role of the President of the Italian Republic (PoR). We apply quantitative narrative analysis (QNA) as the methodological tool of our study, answering two research questions to which the academic literature has so far produced limited responses: (a) whether the PoR can be considered a relevant actor in Italian foreign policy and (b) which factors can affect the Italian PoR’s relevance in foreign policy. Considering the Italian PoR’s Diary as the unit of analysis and source of data, we study the two crucial cases of Ciampi’s presidency (1999–2006) and Napolitano’s first presidency (2006–2013). QNA allows us to quantify and compare, while maintaining an actor-centred approach, the relations of the two PoRs with the most relevant actors in foreign policy. The results of our analyses highlight the relevance of the Italian PoR figure, identifying the main areas of influence of the Italian head of state and their changes over time. We conclude providing a few hypotheses to interpret the outcomes of our analyses on the PoR’s role in Italian foreign policy.

la letteratura sulle politiche di sicurezza nei regimi democratici e caratterizzata da un’elevata eterogeneita concettuale e metodologica. l’articolo cerca innanzitutto di individuare le radici teoriche da cui i diversi studi prendono le mosse, per poi ordinarli sulla base dei due orientamenti generali che li hanno originati: la concettualizzazione verticale del government della sicurezza e quella orizzontale della governance della sicurezza. dopo aver discusso le caratteristiche fondamentali dei due approcci, l’articolo propone nelle conclusioni un abbozzo teorico alternativo. le politiche di sicurezza nelle democrazie contemporanee, tra government e governance mauro tebaldi

The analysis of national police systems is the core subject of several sociological and criminological scholarly papers. This analysis, however, especially when carried out comparatively, has been relatively neglected in political science, leaving important questions unanswered. If law enforcement systems are at the core of a legitimate violence apparatus within modern states, what structural?political factors can determine the differences and the similarities among different national contexts? And how can they be explored? This article aims to fill this gap by developing a theoretical framework and a methodological proposal that facilitate the development of a political science new research agenda. At the theoretical level, this article investigates the long?term organizational features that have shaped the original models of the organizational field underpinning the various European national police systems, which have the ability to persistently affect the development of those police systems. At the methodological level, this article seeks to define a typological instrument that can determine the differences and the similarities among different national police systems in today?s European democracies, as well as their evolutionary features, within a comparative analytical framework.

Many authors agree that the President of the Italian Republic is the head of state with the widest powers among parliamentary governments in Europe. Although several studies have sought to explain Why the President’s power may increase or decrease, a quantitative measurement of the phenomenon—able to answer questions also about the Who (the actors), How (the modalities) and How much (the consistency) of the phenomenon itself—has seldom been carried out by scholars. This paper seeks to answer these unanswered substantive questions by measuring the potential power of the Italian head of state in a crucial case—the first Presidency of Giorgio Napolitano (2006–2013)—by means of a quantitative narrative analysis (QNA) and a social network analysis of his Diary. This is done in a semi-automated way by using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, including regular expressions and named-entity recognition. As regards the methodological contribution of the paper, its aim is to demonstrate that QNA with NLP tools for semi-automated analysis of textual data can be considered an effective and reliable methodology for the empirical investigation of potential power, enabling a more widespread application of this technique in the quantitative analysis of topics related to the power approach—that some scholars consider otherwise obsolete—also at the comparative level.

For over a decade, there has been the widespread awareness that western democracies need to be reformed if they want to successfully cope with the crisis that they are experiencing; also, ultimately, if they want to be able to increase their own level of quality. The aim of this article is to illustrate why and how the quality of a democracy can (and indeed, must) be assessed with the purpose of improving it. Passing through a reflection on the state of the art of a major sector of studies in the international scientific scenario, and by presenting an original typological proposal to classify these same studies, we maintain that the crisis of democracy may be overcome, first of all, by improving the assessment skills of scholars and, secondly, by transforming the knowledge on democratic quality into useful knowledge for citizens.

This article analyses the relations between security, urban governance and democratic quality in the light of the fundamental theoretical trends and principal empirical researches present in the socio-political literature. After introducing the theme from a conceptual point of view, the article reviews the interpretations and explanatory hypotheses, dwelling on the problems each explanation leaves unsettled. In the conclusion there is a discussion on whether urban governance may be considered the most suitable territorial level to improve security policies and democratic quality. To this end, an interpretative hypothesis is introduced that challenges the most consolidated explanations and opens up new perspectives for research.

This paper explores the territorial dimension of local security policies, with reference to the “Security Pacts” signed in Italy between 2007 and 2009. These Security Pacts are an innovative instrument introduced by the central government, aimed at changing the model of security governance at the local level. After describing how Security Pacts have spread, and which institutional actors have participated in them, this study aims at deepening the analysis of their territorial dimension. More specifically, the research question at the basis of this study focuses on the identification of factors that can explain why the pacts feature variations in numbers and types of public administration at different levels, and why they tend to acquire particular spatial configurations rather than others. Three hypotheses are tested based on empirical data (obtained using a Quantitative Narrative Analysis with the aid of Geographic Information Systems and other statistical tools) used to identify which variable may best explain the propensity to use such pacts to solve security-related issues in different areas of the country.

Almost 50 years ago Robert Dahl maintained “we can […] reasonably hope 1 day to achieve great democratic cities. As the optimum unit for democracy in the 21st century, the city has a greater claim, I think, than any other alternative” (Am Polit Sci Rev 61: 953–970, 1967 ). This article intends to ascertain whether the words of one of the greatest scholars of democracy have had a concrete outcome along the pathways taken by democratic theory and whether, therefore, as was the case in classical theory, real superiority has therefore been restored to the city compared with the other territorial institutions of democracy. In this article we begin with two assumptions, each concerning the theoretical status of democratic theory. The first maintains that a realistic and an idealistic dimension coexist in variable dimensions in theoretical democratic models. According to the second assumption, it can be stated that democratic theory envisages the presence of a local territorial dimension, the importance of which is nevertheless variable in the different theoretical models. The thesis we intend to demonstrate here is that the variable nature of the importance of the local-urban territorial dimension depends on the type of balance created between the idealistic and realistic dimensions of the different models of democracy. Concluding, we aim to theoretically demonstrate why (and at which conditions) the city can become, more and better than any other institutional place, the ultimate arena within which the best results may be achieved for democracy in 21st century.