Policy Framing and Party Competition: The Italian Political Debate on Local Public Services since the Economic Crisis

In recent years many European governments reacted to the economic crisis introducing austerity measures that particularly affected Local Public Services (LPSs) through outsourcing, privatization and marketization. While several studies have analysed the logics of instruments choice also in this policy sector, the political discourses and policy frames that accompanied the tools selection for the management of LPSs in the last years have been paid limited attention in the scholarly literature. Starting from these premises, the article analyses the debate on LPSs that has developed in Italy since 2008, reconstructing the frames used by the main parties through the analysis of both electoral manifestos and press reviews of articles relevant to LPSs in three newspapers. Particular attention is paid to the 2011 referendum against the privatization of LPSs and the 2018 referendum on local public transportation management in Rome. The paper concludes that the economic crisis and subsequent transformations of party politics and participation encouraged a politicization of the issues around local public services, as well as a shift in the related policy discourse. The parties' choices and policy frames were guided mainly by a strategic logic defined in relation to the salience of the LPS issue and the competitive context

Times of Crisis : Success or Decline of the Left

The crisis that especially since the 2008 has shown the deep weakness of the capitalistic economic model induces to reflect on the role of the radical left parties and on their capacity to propose alternative policies, interpreting the citizens’ demands. Starting from these premises this article analyses three parties of the radical left party family- United Left, Left Freedom and Ecology and Syriza- that act respectively in Spain, Italy and Greece, three of the European democracies most affected by the social consequences of the crisis. The article proposes a diachronic comparison of the three parties’ policy pro-posals, organizational model and strategies in order to explain their greater or lesser ability to attract con-sensus in the last years

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Policy Framing and Party Competition: The Italian Political Debate on Local Public Services since the Economic Crisis

In recent years many European governments reacted to the economic crisis introducing austerity measures that particularly affected Local Public Services (LPSs) through outsourcing, privatization and marketization. While several studies have analysed the logics of instruments choice also in this policy sector, the political discourses and policy frames that accompanied the tools selection for the management of LPSs in the last years have been paid limited attention in the scholarly literature. Starting from these premises, the article analyses the debate on LPSs that has developed in Italy since 2008, reconstructing the frames used by the main parties through the analysis of both electoral manifestos and press reviews of articles relevant to LPSs in three newspapers. Particular attention is paid to the 2011 referendum against the privatization of LPSs and the 2018 referendum on local public transportation management in Rome. The paper concludes that the economic crisis and subsequent transformations of party politics and participation encouraged a politicization of the issues around local public services, as well as a shift in the related policy discourse. The parties' choices and policy frames were guided mainly by a strategic logic defined in relation to the salience of the LPS issue and the competitive context

Times of Crisis : Success or Decline of the Left

The crisis that especially since the 2008 has shown the deep weakness of the capitalistic economic model induces to reflect on the role of the radical left parties and on their capacity to propose alternative policies, interpreting the citizens’ demands. Starting from these premises this article analyses three parties of the radical left party family- United Left, Left Freedom and Ecology and Syriza- that act respectively in Spain, Italy and Greece, three of the European democracies most affected by the social consequences of the crisis. The article proposes a diachronic comparison of the three parties’ policy pro-posals, organizational model and strategies in order to explain their greater or lesser ability to attract con-sensus in the last years

Policy Framing and Party Competition: The Italian Political Debate on Local Public Services since the Economic Crisis

In recent years many European governments reacted to the economic crisis introducing austerity measures that particularly affected Local Public Services (LPSs) through outsourcing, privatization and marketization. While several studies have analysed the logics of instruments choice also in this policy sector, the political discourses and policy frames that accompanied the tools selection for the management of LPSs in the last years have been paid limited attention in the scholarly literature. Starting from these premises, the article analyses the debate on LPSs that has developed in Italy since 2008, reconstructing the frames used by the main parties through the analysis of both electoral manifestos and press reviews of articles relevant to LPSs in three newspapers. Particular attention is paid to the 2011 referendum against the privatization of LPSs and the 2018 referendum on local public transportation management in Rome. The paper concludes that the economic crisis and subsequent transformations of party politics and participation encouraged a politicization of the issues around local public services, as well as a shift in the related policy discourse. The parties' choices and policy frames were guided mainly by a strategic logic defined in relation to the salience of the LPS issue and the competitive context.<br /

Times of Crisis : Success or Decline of the Left

The crisis that especially since the 2008 has shown the deep weakness of the capitalistic economic model induces to reflect on the role of the radical left parties and on their capacity to propose alternative policies, interpreting the citizens’ demands. Starting from these premises this article analyses three parties of the radical left party family- United Left, Left Freedom and Ecology and Syriza- that act respectively in Spain, Italy and Greece, three of the European democracies most affected by the social consequences of the crisis. The article proposes a diachronic comparison of the three parties’ policy pro-posals, organizational model and strategies in order to explain their greater or lesser ability to attract con-sensus in the last years.<br /

Partiti nazionalisti sub-statali e Unione Europea : i casi del Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG), della Lega Nord (LN) e dello Scottish National Party (SNP)

Dottorato di ricerca in Politica, società e cultura, XXII ciclo. A.a. 2009-2010Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di sociologia e scienza politic

Whatever works? Varieties of local public service delivery between instrumentality and legitimacy

In recent decades, local governments in Western democracies have experienced a number of significant changes in the organizational arrangements to deliver public services. The article aims at systematizing the knowledge currently available on the organizational tools to manage local public services, providing a classification of delivery arrangements that goes beyond the public-private and hierarchy-market dichotomies, trying to unpack these categories so as to take into account the most recent mixed, or hybrid, solutions that are becoming widespread. Then, the article proposes an analytical framework anchored to the conceptual categories of instrumentality and legitimacy to understand how, and under what conditions, different types of factors combine in leading local governments to choose one organisational tool for service delivery over the others. That framework is applied to two Italian municipalities (Bergamo and Livorno) in order to understand how local decision-makers combine cost-efficiency considerations with concerns on the appropriateness of policy solutions in two distinct policy areas, i.e., garbage collection and early childhood services, which should supposedly drive towards different management choice