Unless the Yes campaign can shift tactics, Italy’s constitutional referendum is heading for a No vote

Italy’s constitutional referendum, scheduled for 4 December, has been billed as a vote of confidence in the country’s Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi. James Dennison and Jonas Bergan Draege illustrate, however, the more voters are invited to link the proposed reforms to Renzi, the less likely they are to support them. They suggest that with support for the reforms falling over recent months, the best strategy for a Yes vote may be to capitalise on distrust in political parties by reframing the referendum as a way to reduce the number of politicians in parliament

Reaction: Italian referendum and Matteo Renzi’s resignation

Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, has announced he will resign following defeat in the country’s constitutional referendum. We asked a number of EUROPP contributors for their immediate thoughts on the result, Renzi’s resignation, and where Italy is heading next. Alberto Alemanno: “The vote has killed the dream of once in a generation change” James Newell: “The result was not simply another anti-establishment revolt” Andrea Lorenzo Capussela: “Rationality imposed itself, and in large numbers” Silvia Merler: “Italy is now headed for a complex and delicate period of political and economic uncertainty” Lorenzo Piccoli: “Renzi did not have much choice but to resign” Jonas Bergan Draege: “Both the M5S and Lega Nord could emerge strengthened from the No vote” Angelo Martelli: “The determinant factor of Renzi’s defeat has been the sluggish pace of the Italian recovery” Davide Morisi: “The correlation is clear: Renzi’s personalisation strategy has backfired” Mattia Guidi: “Listening to the will of the people will be a hard task: several questions have no answer at present” James Dennison: “This was no Brexit-Trump moment: The package of reforms was complex and broad enough for citizens of all stripes to find cause for concern” Fabio Bordignon: “Renzi’s 41% – ironically, the same result he had obtained at the 2014 European election – became the symbol of his defeat

The aftermath of Turkey's Gezi protests : how political parties respond to social movements

Defence date: 05 September 2017Examining Board: Professor Donatella Della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore (EUI Supervisor); Professor Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute; Professor Ali Çarkoğlu, Koç University; Professor Katrin Uba, Uppsala UniversityThis thesis explores how Turkey's political parties responded to the Gezi Park protests in 2012. I assess how four political parties framed the protests, whether the latter were accompanied by changes in the parties' platforms and priorities, and whether politicians in office adjusted practical policies to accommodate protest demands. In this research I draw on original data of parliamentary interventions, budget allocations, semi-structured interviews, and secondary sources, to answer these questions. The Gezi protests received a great deal of attention from politicians, especially from the two opposition parties closest to the protests, the CHP and the BDP. However, both parties responded to the demands that aligned best with their pre-existing agendas, and with different loci of attention. The protests were also met with practical concessions on a few specific demands. Yet these policy responses were narrowly targeted at the object and symbol of the initial protests rather than at their underlying grievances. Consequently, I argue that the responses from the CHP and the BDP were supportive, but limited. There was a policy response, but it did not go very deep. There was a platform response, but it framed the demands in the direction of pre-existing platforms. There was an organisational response and a response in terms of electoral strategies, but many of these were symbolic, and not accompanied by major changes in party platforms. In this sense, it may be useful to talk about the institutional response to the Gezi protest as a creative process for these two political parties. When party representatives spoke about the protests, they highlighted those issues where their party already had ownership. Furthermore, while the BDP supported several of the protesters’ demands, the CHP was more supportive of the protest actors themselves. I use this finding to suggest an extension of the concept of the protest paradigm in the social movement literature. Until now the protest paradigm has mainly been used to describe how antagonists of protests delegitimize protests, whereas I suggest that it is also is a possible strategy for supportive actors. This novel use of the protest paradigm is a main contribution of this thesis. More generally, the thesis combines the literature on social movement outcomes and party politics, and contributes to an expansion of studies of social movement outcomes to cases outside the area of Western liberal democracies.Chapter 6 ‘Party changes following the Gezi protests' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article 'Social movements within organisations : occupy parties in Italy and Turkey' (2016) in the journal ‘South European society and politics

Gulf-funding of British universities and the focus on human development

We use quantitative content analysis to compare the academic publications and events of Gulf-funded Middle East research institutions in the uk to those that have not received such funding from a Middle Eastern donor. Our results provide some support for hypotheses about funding leading to a bias in the selection of research topics. We show that Gulf-funding of uk Middle East Studies research institutions is associated with less focus on democracy and human rights than non-funded comparable institutions. Moreover, we show that Gulf-funded institutions focus more on their donor countries than do non Gulf-funded institutions, but that they give more attention to issues of education and youth unemployment than issues of democracy, human rights, and gender equality when writing about their donor countries

The formation of Syrian opposition coalitions as two-level games

This article investigates coalition patterns between two main factions of the Syrian opposition before and after the 2011 uprising. The two factions united over common platforms on several occasions following the 2000 Damascus Spring, but failed to do so in 2011 despite repeated domestic and international pressure. Drawing upon two-level game theory to explain this change, this article argues that increased interest from both domestic and international audiences after 2011 made the two factions less flexible in negotiating a unified platform. Thus, paradoxically, it was increased pressure for unification that deterred the opposition factions from unifying

The dynamics of electoral politics after the Arab Spring : evidence from Tunisia

First published online: 26 February 2020This article uses new survey evidence from Tunisia, conducted shortly after the three first elections following the Arab Spring, to explain dynamics in electoral behaviour. We find that the strongest and most consistent predictors of vote choice were gender, religiosity and attitudes to the role of Islam in public life. Economic attitudes, other socio-demographics and clientelistic motivations were consistently less or not important factors. These findings support the notion of a paramount Islamist-Secular divide, which is distinct from the Western Left-Right divide, in the Arab World. We also find evidence that Tunisian voters underwent a learning process over the course of elections. Overall, we present evidence to suggest that the primacy of the Islamist-secular axis of political conflict is, in accordance with the evidence from other early divides in transitional democracies, elite-driven, and so is likely to decline in importance over time

Making sense of Italy’s constitutional referendum

Published online: 21 Mar 2017This article seeks to explain the rejection of the reforms proposed in the 2016 Constitutional Referendum in Italy. We contend that Renzi's promise to resign if he were to lose the referendum did not significantly affect the final result. While highly partisan voting patterns may lead to speculation that this so-called personalization strategy caused the rejection, we argue that voters probably would have followed party cues anyway. Instead, we argue that the fundamental explanation for the results was voter ambivalence towards the reforms themselves, based on insufficient information about the complex package and its broad coalition of opponents

Social movements within organisations : occupy parties in Italy and Turkey

Published online 23 June 2016This paper analyses a little-studied phenomenon: movements within parties. While parties and movements are often assumed to be separate entities, the borders between the two have proved to be more fluent. Parties frequently play a pivotal role in movement politics, and movements influence parties through the dual militancy of many of their members. The article presents two cases of Occupy movements taking place within major left-of-centre parties - the Italian PD and the Turkish CHP - and analyses the causes of discontent within the party and the choice of activists to voice this discontent rather than exit the party. It is argued that, beyond country specificities, shared factors include the perceived betrayal of social-democratic values, a lack of internal democracy, and electoral defeats. In both cases, activists’ choice to refer to Occupy in their opposition inside the party can be explained by the normative resonance of anti-austerity protest claims and forms within the party, as well as the instrumental exploitation of mass media attention to Occupy as a logo