Government approval in Italy: Political cycle,economic expectations and TV coverage

This paper analyses government approval in Italy – which has become a key aspect for electoral support in the new party system of the Second Republic – exploring the influence that TV coverage exerts on approval net of traditional accounts of government support. Relying on both aggregate time series and pooled individual-level surveys analyses, it is shown that communication has a sizable impact on government approval. The popularity of Centre-Left and Centre-Right governments is affected evenly by the economy but differently by the news coverage of their activity. People with lower political interest are the most reactive to news coverage of government performance.     

Footnotes to Guamán Poma: Transtemporal Encounters in Nacha Vollenweider's Notas al pie

The graphic memoir Notas al pie (2017) written by Argentinian Nacha Vollenweider includes an illustration which reinterprets an image from the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, a colonial document written by Quechua nobleman Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala around 1615, when Peru was under Spanish rule. This article argues that if Guamán Poma's image portrays a critique of Western colonial power, Vollenweider's reappropriation follows its aftermath, and targets the structures of coloniality that underpin the formation of both individual and collective identity.     

Right-wing populism against diploma democracy. The evolution of parliamentary elites in Austria,Italy, and Switzerland

Are the sociological profiles of radical right-wing populist parties' (RRPPs) representatives really unlike those of their counterparts in mainstream parties? Once RRPPs occupy positions of legislative power for an extended period, do their MPs' profiles increasingly converge with those of more mainstream parties? This paper examines three right-wing parties in Austria, Italy, and Switzerland (FPÖ, LEGA, and SVP), and shows how RRPPs' MPs persistently contrast the “diploma democracy”, that is the increasingly dominant high-educated trend in political representation. Inspired by the current scholarship's diachronic and comparative perspectives of political elites and MPs, the analysis focuses trends since the 1980s.     

Dawn C. Murphy,China’s Rise in the Global South: The Middle East,Africa and Beijing’s Alternative World Order

Journal of Chinese Political Science -