The effect of emigration on home-country political institutions

The number of immigrants from developing countries living in richer, more developed countries has increased substantially during the last decades. At the same time, the quality of institutions in developing countries has also improved. The data thus suggest a close positive correlation between average emigration rates and institutional quality. Recent empirical literature investigates whether international migration can be an important factor for institutional development. Overall, the findings indicate that emigration to institutionally developed countries induces a positive effect on home-country institutions

Political Participation by the Deprived: A Comparative Analysis in Political Behavior by Unemployed Young Adults

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A policy-oriented approach to co-production. The case of homestay accommodation for refugees and asylum seekers

While co-production has become ever more crucial for contemporary public administration, there is no shared understanding on how to identify the co-producers. Drawing on a policy-oriented approach to co-production, this article develops a theoretical framework to identify policy beneficiaries and policy targets by looking at policy goals. Based on this distinction, we shed light on the different role that citizens can play in co-production, i.e., regular producers, clients, volunteers, or citizen producers. To validate this theoretical framework empirically, the article analyses different homestay-accommodation projects for refugees. Our findings will help scholars and practitioners to identify co-producers more accurately

Precarious Voices? Types of “Political Citizens” and Repertoires of Action among European Youth

This article’s goal is to explore the existence of ‘political citizens’ profiles across three European cities (Turin, Cologne and Lyon) and to ascertain the role of an unstable occupational status on the repertoires of action deployed. For this purpose, a technique called latent class cluster analysis (LCCA) is applied to a large sample, including young precarious and regular workers (deployed as a reference group). This technique allowed us to derive five descriptive probabilistic profiles of ‘political citizens’ and their repertoires of action in each city. The empirical findings underline the emergence of hybrid repertoires of action together with ‘single-issue’ or ‘cause-oriented’ forms of political participation. This study represents an attempt to encourage the dialogue between two strands of research in social sciences, namely sociology of work and political participation and to foster the formation of an innovative research agenda crossing these two fields

Re‐thinking policy and (multi‐level) governance failure: What went wrong and why in the reception of Ukrainian refugees in Italy?

Following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and the arrival of 170,000 refugees, the already fragile Italian refugee system was forced to undergo major re-structuring and expansion. Re-organisation included the adoption of partially new multi-level governance relationships, as well as political instruments. Despite the widespread positive attitude of public opinion toward the Ukrainian refugees and the bipartisan support for their reception, the outcome of the policy has been not in line with the goals the proponents set out to achieve. In fact, there have been delays, poor assistance to those who have offered to host, and, in the end, a partial waste of the economic and human resources which were devoted to the reception itself. The purpose of this article is to investigate the origin and development of the “vices” of this process, departing from the interpretive lens on policy and governance failure. Our findings consolidate the theoretical challenge to the reductive binary rhetoric on success and failure, and the classic view of failure confined to formulation and implementation. In addition, the article shows that multi-level governance dynamics are strongly relevant in explaining the “vices” of policies, particularly highlighting the role, until now largely disregarded, of the latent conflicts between the actors involved. The study has benefited from 38 semi-structured interviews with political actors, including third-party organisations and public actors, the analysis of political documents, and local and national media

The Paradox of Italian Associational Sector: Low Participation, High Innovation

Come già ricordato, l’Italia è sempre stata caratterizzata da un livello di partecipazione associativa molto basso, soprattutto se paragonato ad altri Paesi europei. Il dato ha impressionato gli osservatori fin dalle prime ricerche (ricordiamo fra le altre quella di Gabriel Almond e Sidney Verba (1963)sulla cultura civica). In un contesto in cui l’integrazione politica era ampiamente basata su culture di partito - la cosiddetta Prima Repubblica - la maggior parte delle reti associative era collaterale ai partiti politici di massa (Biorcio, 2007: 189). Proprio per queste ragioni, per mettere a fuoco i tratti dell’associazionismo contemporaneo, dobbiamo adottare una prospettiva di medio periodo, e analizzare i cambiamenti successivi a ‘Tangentopoli’ e al crollo dei partiti di massa (...)

A scoping review of gambling policy research in Europe

In Europe, gambling policy is conditioned by different administrative levels, including national authorities and the EU, as well as institutions of the European Economic Area (EEA). The legal framework of the EU/EEA requires Member States to pursue evidence-based policy. The current scoping review focuses on what kind of policy research is available on gambling in the European context to support evidence-based policy. We searched three scientific databases for research literature on gambling regulation and policy in the European context. The final sample consists of 88 papers. We analysed the corpus with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency mapping, and, narratively, by applying the policy cycle phases (agenda-setting, formulation, adoption, implementation, and evaluation). Overall, the results show that gambling policy research is a growing field in Europe, and the policy cycle describes the available literature amply. The largest part of the existing research concerns the evaluation phase, while the formulation and implementation phases are under-represented. The findings are discussed in terms of the main outcomes, as well as in terms of the gaps in the existing research

Anti-gambling policies: Framing morality policy in Italy

Recent research on morality policy has focused on policy change, morality framing and the presence of favourable cultural opportunity structures (COSs). The resulting literature describing various aspects of morality policy has failed to discuss the impact of multilevel dynamic in this field. This contribution examines gambling policy in Italy, applying a multilevel approach to detect the presence of favourable COSs, and whether policymakers frame policies morally. Italy offers a particularly fertile field for the study of morality policy, featuring a liberal national approach versus local restrictive policy. By applying a methodology based on semistructured interviews and secondary sources, we examine the national and local political spheres, demonstrating that morality framing, when detected, is more likely to be found at the local level where the influence of experts and interest groups on legislators may result in the transformation of a health policy based on paternalistic considerations

The WEST Study: A Retrospective and Multicentric Study on the Impact of Steroid Therapy in West Nile Encephalitis

Background: The use of steroid therapy in potentially life-threatening neuroinvasive forms of West Nile infection (WNND) is controversial. The aim of this study is to assess the efficacy of steroid therapy in reducing intrahospital mortality, length of stay, and neurological sequelae at discharge. Methods: This was a multicenter, retrospective, observational study conducted in 5 hospitals in Northern Italy, headed by the Fondazione IRCSS Policlinico San Matteo (Pavia). We extracted all patient data with WNND diagnoses, comparing patients who received steroid treatment with patients who did not receive steroid treatment between January 2014 and January 2022. Comparisons between the 2 groups were performed using chi-square tests for categorical variables and Mann-Whitney tests for non-normal continuous data, and a generalized linear model for the binomial family was carried out. Results: Data from 65 WNND patients were extracted. Among these patients, 33 (50.7%) received steroid therapy at any point during their hospitalization. Receiving steroid therapy did not significantly reduce intrahospital mortality (odds ratio [OR], 1.70; 95% CI, 0.3-13.8; P = .89) or neurological sequelae at discharge (OR, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.16-1.76; P = .47). Conclusions: Steroid treatment is currently used on a single-case basis in severe WNND. More prospective data are needed to demonstrate a protective effect on mortality and neurological sequelae