Ideological proximity and valence competition. Negative campaigning through allegation of corruption in the Italian legislative arena from 1946 to 1994

We consider the possibility for the parties to invest in negative campaigning – a behavior that, in our framework, involves blaming alleged insufficiencies of the rival concerning commonly shared values. Within a simple one-dimensional model, we deduce the hypothesis that the parties’ incentive to “attack” each other increases with the parties’ proximity on the left–right space. We test our hypothesis on an Italian case, focusing on the emphasis placed by the Communist Party on political corruption issues during the government investiture debates that spanned from the postwar period until 1994, when the traditional party system abruptly collapsed. The statistical results are largely consistent with our theoretical insights.     

Engines need transmission belts: the importance of people in technology transfer offices

The Journal of Technology Transfer - Over the last 20 years, universities and Public Research Organizations have increased their efforts to transfer their research results towards...     

From one participant cohort to another: Surveying inter-generational political incubation in an Indian University

Several recent studies propose that political choices of Indian youth can hardly be distinguished from those of their parents in many respects. Contrary to this well-established understanding, this article shows that when set apart from the spheres of family and work, students in a flagship Indian university—mostly in the social sciences and humanities—gradually transform their political attitudes in light of prolonged exposure to a campus environment. Through combining ethnographic study with the analysis of a survey of political attitudes of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students, we show that time spent in situ fosters participation to political activities, increases chances of joining a student organization and make students more likely to identify themselves as politically radical. The class and caste background of students, on the other hand, are not strongly associated with political attitudes, showing the integrative nature of politicization on the JNU campus.