Beyond left and right: the eclectic populism of the Five Star Movement

Abstract

Born in 2009, the Five Star Movement (FSM) has been one of the most electorally successful European populist parties since 2013. While its classification as a populist party is unanimously accepted, some have considered it close to left-libertarian positions, others as an anti-immigrant far right party, and still others have simply deemed it as unclassifiable. This article sets out to shed light on this question, using the official documents issued by the party since 2009, posts retrieved from Grillo’s blog during three electoral campaigns, and the opinions of the party’s supporters as expressed in three surveys in 2013, 2014 and 2016. Although displaying a clear anti-establishment identity, in economic terms it presents left-of-centre positions inconsistently mixed with more conservative proposals, while on the issues of citizenship and immigration, it has an elusive positioning, mixing national securitisation and international humanitarianism. The conclusions highlight the eclectic nature of FSM’s populism.     

University–Industry collaboration in the biopharmaceuticals: the Italian case

We investigate the determinants of University–Industry (U–I) interactions in the biopharmaceuticals in Italy over the period 2004–2010, choosing co-publishing as a proxy of U–I partnerships. We construct a novel dataset of co-published articles, that contains measures of proximities, agglomeration, firms’ and universities’ characteristics. Following a consolidated methodology, we integrate our dataset of effective interactions with the set of all potential interactions, to estimate probabilistic models for the occurrence and the intensity of U–I interactions. Our main findings confirm and extend the predictions of the previous literature: (1) geographical proximity and prior partnership increase the probability and the intensity of co-publication; (2) the proximity of a firm to other biopharmaceutical firms and universities attenuates the relevance of geographical proximity; (3) there exists complementarity between prior partnerships and geographical proximity. A novel result is that firms’ and Universities’ size, firms’ R&D and patents expenditure and the composition of the academic staff as well as quality of academic research exert a significant impact on the intensity of co-publishing.     

An emerging theory of the effect of economic contraction on alcohol abuse in the United States

Recent research in the United States describing the association between adverse economic experiences and the risk of clinically significant alcohol abuse is reviewed. A theory of how economic contraction affects the incidence of alcohol abuse is offered. Implications of the theory for economic policy and the provision of services are discussed.     

Village politics in Sicily: A response to peter Schneider

The author replies to the review of his book, Political Authority in a Sicilian Village, by Peter Schneider in The Journal of Peasant Studies (Vol. 13, No. 1, October 1985). He argues that Schneider has misrepresented his work in several regards, and especially with respect to the fundamental question of the study. This is not whether Sicilian institutional arrangements are imposed by an alien state, but whether the structure of basic social institutions has been the primary instrument for advancing human welfare or is the essential source of human adversity among Sicilian villagers.     

Europeanization as a Democratization Tool? The Case of Morocco

This paper applies the Europeanization ‘toolkit’ to EU democratization policies in Morocco within the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) framework. To this aim, the bottom-up and top-down dimensions of EU?Morocco relations are analysed diachronically both before and after the Arab Spring. The analysis shows that the Moroccan ruling elite has used the anchor to the EU as a survival strategy and that the EU has merely responded to Moroccan political liberalization rather than having influenced it. Therefore, the paper debates the extent to which the very notion of Europeanization might be used with respect to democratization policies in Morocco, and it shows an overturning of the sender?receiver relationship proving that Europeanization has been used instrumentally rather than having any autonomous supportive effect on democratization.     

The Impact of Environmental Factors on the Measurement of Managerial Efficiency in the Italian Waste Management Sector: Framework and Empirical Evidence

ABSTRACT

The public and private sectors are different in terms of ownership, funding, and control. The degree of publicness influences the decision-making processes, strategies, and actions, thus severely impacting the performance levels. This study contributes to the existing literature on managerial efficiency environmental factors by proposing a framework and methodology for estimating the influence of the “publicness effect.” A new method is tested, relying on the combined integration of three different data envelopment analysis models in the Italian waste management sector. Results show that the “publicness effect” accounts for 33.87% of managerial efficiency for public companies and 11.6% for mixed ones.