Can Facebook really be a tool for supporting citizen engagement during emergencies?

The present study explores how Italian regions and their presidents employed Facebook during the Covid-19 pandemic to encourage citizen engagement. To do so, it adopts quantitative methodologies. Our results show that most public actors increased their levels of social activity during the pandemic but mainly for promoting public communication and that citizens much prefer interacting with presidents. Moreover, citizen engagement was higher when posts were published during nonbusiness hours or weekends, while it decreased when posts contained photos or videos.     

The Performance of Nursery Schools in Italian Municipalities

In a neo-liberal approach, the need to increase levels of cost saving, effectiveness, and quality in producing local public services is correlated to awareness of the limited resources available and is an economic issue that has been much debated in recent decades. Ways of measuring and evaluating public services have stimulated academic interest for several years now. In this context, evaluating the levels of performance of public services provided by non-profit organizations (NPOs) as a consequence of contracting-out by public administration is an essential variable in rationalizing—both in terms of quantity and quality—public expenditure.

The aim of this article is to measure multi-dimensional aspects of nursery school services offered by Italian municipalities and to verify whether using different management models makes a difference in the results obtained. We examine data contained in final accounts of main Italian municipalities in order to evaluate effectiveness, cost saving, and quality aspects of the nursery school service supplied.

Regarding overall performance, the distinction between direct management and contracting-out has not brought out significant differences in terms of effectiveness and cost saving, even if the direct management solution is better than the externalized one. By contrast, as previous research showed, quality levels for externalized services are on average lower than for directly managed services.     

Extensions of the Simpson voting rule to the committee selection setting

Public Choice - Committee selection rules are procedures selecting sets of candidates (committees) of a given size on the basis of the preferences of the voters. Two natural extensions of the...     

The decision of the Italian Constitutional Court on numerus clausus: A matter for Community law

This article discusses the recent decision of the Italian Constitutional Court on the numerus clausus issue, containing the first relevant pronouncement by the highest jurisdiction on the constitutional legality of the measures adopted so far by the Ministry. The Constitutional Court considers these measures in conformity with the Constitution to the extent that they implement Community law, and especially certain directives on the recognition of qualifications. Thus, Community law is deemed to provide the proper legal framework to adopt certain regulations, amongst which restrictions to access. This article argues that, in the context of litigation on access to university, Community law has been used improperly and that, in any event, a convenient solution to the issue could have been found in national law. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.