Institutional Trust and the Effectiveness of Public Institutions

　Putting trust at the crossing of the uncertainty, risk, and costs any given relationship may entail is a necessary step to grasp the bearing trust has on the way relationships take shape and evolve. Next, however, attention needs to focus on how trust interplays with the specific characteristics of a relationship and with those of the actors involved. The paper is about how trust counts in the relationships that for whatever reason go on in ordinary life between single actors and all kinds of public institutions set up to implement a given set of rules （laws, norms of different kinds） addressed to the public regulation of a specific aspect of social life.　Based on these premises, the discussion focuses on the way in which trust is related to two main characteristics of these relationships: the way rules count and the role played by the subjects called to implement them. In principle the content of the relationship between an individual actor and a given public institution is expected not to be the outcome of a negotiation but rather reflect the definite enforcement of a given set of rules. The actual content, however, deviates from this expectation, if for no other reason, because not all individual actors grant the same legitimacy to the rules and because the implementation of the rules is subject both to the competence and to the intentions of the actors involved – more to the point, to the way in which any public official plays out the discretionary power he/she has in administering the institutional rules. In this light, trust becomes a main factor in explaining why a given deviation occurs, its possible management, and ultimately the effectiveness of public institutions

Investigating the Structure and Meaning of Public Service Motivation across Populations: Developing an International Instrument and Addressing Issues of Measurement Invariance

The growth in international research on public service motivation (PSM) raises a number of important questions about the degree to which the theory and research developed in one country can contribute to our understanding of PSM in other counties. To help address this issue, this study revisits the conceptual and operational definitions of PSM to address weaknesses previously noted in the literature. Although some important steps have been taken to both improve and internationalize the PSM scale, this work has been done incrementally. In contrast, this study takes a more systematic and comprehensive approach by combining the efforts of international PSM scholars to develop and then test a revised measurement instrument for PSM in 12 countries. Although the resulting four dimensional 16-item measure of PSM reported here provides a better theoretical and empirical foundation for the measurement of PSM, our results suggest that the exact meaning and scaling of PSM dimensions are likely to differ across cultures and languages. These results raise serious concerns regarding the ability to develop a single universal scale of PSM, or making direct comparisons of PSM across countrie

Il Centro Allerta Tsunami (CAT) dell’INGV

The Tsunami Alert Centre of the INGV (CAT-INGV) was created with the aim of contributing to the mitigation of the risk due to tsunamis triggered by earthquakes on the Italian and Mediterranean coasts. Tsunamis of seismic origin, in addition to being the most frequent, are those that can be detected more quickly. Seismic waves, in fact, travel in the crust with a much higher speed than that of tsunami waves. With effective seismic networks connected in real time, an "Early Warning" system can be implemented, i.e. a system capable of sending an alert signal before the arrival of the tsunami waves, at least from a certain distance from the source. The CAT-INGV has two main tasks. The first one is to provide alerts to the competent authorities in the event of potential tsunamigenic earthquakes in the Mediterranean, taking into account the criteria defined by the Department of Civil Protection for this purpose. The second one consists in carrying out the necessary studies for the definition of the probabilistic danger of tsunamis for the Italian coasts, starting from those of seismic origin (Seismic Probabili-stic Tsunami Hazard Analysis, SPTHA). In this contribution the first aspect is described, while the realization of the studies on hazard at the Mediterranean scale is the subject of research described in various recent articles (Lorito et al., 2015; Grezio et al., 2017; Selva et al., 2017a; Selva et al., 2017b). The TSUMAPS-NEAM project, funded by the European Commission and concluded at the end of 2017, provided the first hazard map for the Mediterranean region and the north-east Atlantic (Basili et al., 2017).Published91-975T. Modelli di pericolosità sismica e da maremotoN/A or not JC

Changing Forms of Regulation and the Transformation of States

L'oratore ha presentato e discusso in che modo cambiano le forme di regolazione degli stati europei come effetto della regolazione comunitaria europea

Politica senza buona amministrazione: il personale dell’Agenzia delle entrate

In che modo, limitando l'effettiva autonomia da parte della dirigenza nella gestione delle risorse umane, l'intrusione della politica può tradursi in cattiva amministrazione

Perché e come contano le istituzioni

Perchè e in che modo le istituzioni - ed in particolare il buon funzionamento delle istituzioni pubbliche - contano ai fini di efficaci politiche di sviluppo locale con attenzione al Mezzogiorno. Nell'ambito della discussione si torna sul rapporto tra funzionamento delle istituzioni e capitale socale, e istituzioni e produzione di beni collettivi