The personality of populists: provocateurs,charismatic leaders,or drunken dinner guests?

Abstract

The ‘populist phenomenon’ has received a lot of attention in recent years. Yet little is known about the populists themselves: who are they? They are often described as bad-mannered provocateurs disrupting the political game, but also as charismatic leaders able to persuade and motivate. Can a populist ‘style’ or ‘personality’ be identified? This article assesses to what extent populists score differently from ‘mainstream’ politicians on established personality inventories. Using a new dataset based on expert ratings for 152 candidates (including 33 populists) having competed in 73 elections worldwide, it is found that populists score lower on agreeableness, emotional stability and conscientiousness. At the same time, populists score higher on extraversion, narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. These results have important implications for the study of the success of populists in contemporary democracies and beyond.     

Context and Mechanisms in Administrative Reform Processes: Performance Management Within Italian Local Government

ABSTRACT

This article aims to present new research on the politics of public management reform in Napoleonic countries. Drawing on the institutional processualist approach, the empirical analysis tracks and explains the trajectory and outcomes of episodes where performance management has been introduced at the local level in Italy. The comparative case analysis shows that plausible causal explanation of the outcomes of public management reform can occur only if researchers are attentive to the interaction between social mechanisms and contextual features together with their interconnections through time.     

Vote as you Think: Determinants of Consistent Decision Making in Direct Democracy

This study investigates the conditions under which Swiss citizens take consistent decisions, that is, decisions that reflect their argument‐based opinions, during direct‐democratic ballots. In line with recent work on cognitive political behavior, we expect the drivers of consistent voting to be found at the individual and contextual level. At the individual level, we argue that political knowledge positively affects consistent decisions. At the contextual level, we anticipate a positive effect for campaign intensity, complexity and negativism. We estimate hierarchical logistic models based on VOX survey data (1999‐2005) and original data that captures the nature of political campaigns. Our results support our expectations for the situational level and (partially) for the individual factors.     

Unexpected double lethal oleander poisoning

Nerium oleander is a very popular urban ornamental plant in Europe, but it is also extremely dangerous because it contains several types of glycosides, accidental ingestion of which can cause cardiac arrhythmias and even deaths. The rarity of such cases makes it difficult to think of oleander poisoning without evidences that suggest this possibility as the cause of the unexpected death. This report concerns the discovery of the bodies of 2 young people, a man and a woman, in a forest in conditions of extreme malnutrition. Medicolegal investigations showed neither pathologic nor traumatic causes of death, but the presence of vegetal remains in the stomach was noticed. A common toxicological analysis resulted negative, but the implementation of more detailed investigations showed the presence of digoxin in the blood of both cadavers, excluding the possibility of a pharmaceutical provenience of digoxin, this laboratory result was interpreted as evidence of ingestion of oleander, which contains oleandrine, the cross reaction of which with digoxin is widely described in the literature. Identification of the 2 subjects, which occurred after 4 years, strengthened the hypothesis of accidental poisoning by oleander because it was ascertained that the 2 young people were vegans--extreme vegetarians who reject the ingestion of foods of animal origin and live by eating only what they find in nature.     

An Exceptional Case of Acute Respiratory Failure Caused by Intra‐Thoracic Gastric Perforation Secondary to Overeating

An 18‐year‐old female patient arrived at the emergency department complaining of abdominal pain and fullness after a heavy meal. Physical examination revealed she was filthy and cover in feces, and she experienced severe abdominal distension. She died in ED and a diagnostic autopsy examination was requested. At external examination, the pathologist observed a significant dilation of the anal sphincter and suspected sexual assault, thus alerting the Judicial Authority who assigned the case to our department for a forensic autopsy. During the autopsy, we observed anal orifice expansion without signs of violence; food was found in the pleural cavity. The stomach was hyper‐distended and perforated at three different points as well as the diaphragm. The patient was suffering from anorexia nervosa with episodes of overeating followed by manual voiding of her feces from the anal cavity (thus explaining the anal dilatation). The forensic pathologists closed the case as an accidental death.     

From unknown to known: Identification of the remains at the mausoleum of fosse Ardeatine

During the Second World War, on 24th March 1944, 335 Italians were massacred near Rome by the occupying forces of Nazi Germany. Four months later forensic examination led to the identification of 323 out of 335 victims. After approximately 60?years, the identification of the remaining unidentified twelve victims began with anthropological and genetic analysis carried out by a team of Italian forensic experts. Anthropological analysis was performed in field in order to confirm the sex of each victim and verify the presence of only one individual in each grave for a correct sampling. Selected bone fragments for each individual were then collected and transferred to the laboratory for genetic analysis. Although the anthropological ante mortem information was limited, morphological and metrical data was collected for a possible future identification of the victims. Subsequently, the typing of autosomal loci, Y-STR and mtDNA D-loop region of all bone and available reference samples was conducted. LR and cumulative LRs obtained from autosomal STR and Y-STR results confirmed the alleged relationship between three victims and their relatives with values over 10⁴ (one sample) and 10⁶ (two samples). Therefore, the genetic analysis offered the families the possibility of replacing the number of the grave with the name of the victim.     

Shooting distance estimation for shots fired by a shotgun loaded with buckshot cartridges

The present study was carried out to clarify the problem of shooting distance estimation, by studying shots fired with buckshot ammunition in 12 gauge shotgun.For this purpose, the pattern diameter (PD) and the distances between buckshot (DBB) within the pattern were evaluated.Experimental shots were carried out with three differently choked barrels: full, half and cylinder; Winchester-Western OOB and OB buckshot ammunition were used.The results show that the estimation of shooting distance, based on the present parameters, is scarcely reliable especially when this estimation must be calculated on the basis of only a few wound holes on which measurements are made.     

Conflict of interest regulation in European parliaments: Studying the evolution of complex regulatory regimes

The growing complexity of parliamentary ethics regulation adopted over the last decades makes the systematic examination of its nature and the rationales underpinning regulatory choices an important endeavor. In this paper we introduce conceptualizations and measurements of conflict of interest (COI) regulation directed toward assuring the impartial and unbiased decisionmaking of national parliamentarians. We distinguish the strictness of rules, the nature of enforcement, sanctions, and transparency requirements as core elements defining COI regimes. Applying our framework to 27 European democracies, we select two cases for in‐depth analysis in which legislators chose very different solutions in response to growing pressures to regulate themselves, to inductively explore the drivers underpinning the choice of COI mechanisms: the United Kingdom, which adopted a highly transparency‐oriented regime, and Belgium, which adopted a highly sanction‐oriented COI regime. Echoing neo‐institutionalist perspectives, the longitudinal analyses indicate how the two democracies’ different institutional environments shape distinct answers to similar functional pressures.