How do Euroskeptic parties adjust their rhetoric when the European Union expands its fiscal and redistributive role? We address this question by examining the impact of the next-generation EU (NGEU) program on parliamentary debates in Italy, the largest beneficiary of EU recovery funds. Drawing on an original dataset of over 700 hand-coded parliamentary statements covering 30 debates in the Italian Chamber of Deputies (2018–2024), we show that the launch of NGEU coincided with a measurable increase in supportive rhetoric toward the EU, especially among parties with Euroskeptic profiles, a shift that is not solely attributable to changes in government status. Our findings suggest that EU-level redistributive policies can contribute to altering, at least temporarily, domestic party discourse in parliament, pointing to the domestic political relevance of fiscal integration

Political ideology has regained prominence in political science and psychology. On the one hand, most of the literature recognizes that ideology is not characterized by a single dimension. On the other hand, recent scholarship has returned to Converse's classic conceptualization of ideology as a belief system: a network of interconnected political beliefs. Using survey data collected after the 2022 Italian general elections, I examine the dimensionality of political attitudes and compare latent and network conceptualizations. Results confirm that Italian political attitudes are bidimensional, and that a partial correlation network model captures their structure very well. I then apply Correlational Class Analysis to identify three distinct belief system types. Political orientations (left-right self-placement and vote) emerge as the strongest individual-level predictors of class membership. I explain these findings through an extension of Converse's theory: while he argued that belief systems primarily vary in tightness (internal consistency), I show that conflicting partisan cues might foster low belief consensus: disagreement over which attitudes should be held together.

Political misinformation represents a challenge to contemporary democracies. It is widely acknowledged that misinformation is not only spread by individual users on social media, but also by politicians employing both digital and legacy media to disseminate biased or misleading content to advance their political agendas. This study explores the mechanisms through which misinformed statements made by politicians influence public opinion and examines the effectiveness of corrections from academic/official sources or fact-checking websites, also focusing on the role of partisanship. We investigate whether agreement with a misinformed statement on key policy issues – minimum wage, COVID-19 vaccination, and working hours – increases when it is attributed to a politician, and whether corrections by academic/official sources or fact-checkers reduce agreement. Through survey experiments conducted in Italy, we find that while misinformation from politicians does not always affect agreement with false statements, corrections generally decrease agreement. However, partisanship plays a crucial role, with individuals more likely to resist correction when misinformation comes from politicians they have more positive feelings toward. These findings shed light on the complex relationship between misinformation, the effectiveness of corrective messages, and political identity in shaping public opinion.

Within 18 months of its second consecutive general election (March 2018) as Italy's largest party, the valence populist 5-Star Movement (M5S) had dropped to polling 4th, halving its 30% + vote-share, behind parties of both the right and the left. In those 18-months, the party participated in two governments: one of the right and one of the centre-left. Two broad explanations for such decline are presented here: party credibility loss related to its (non)-ideological placement and penalties associated with incumbency. The former is predicted to lead those who initially supported the party to disengage from party preferences while the later is predicted to have respondents desert their preference for M5S to other parties. Using Italian panel survey data on partisan representation from March 2018 through September 2020, this manuscript identifies the opinions of those who those who deserted the party, those who disengaged from party preferences, and those who remained loyal to M5S. Descriptive analysis will first call attention to the differences between loyalists, deserters, the disengaged, and survey respondents more broadly. Multivariate analysis suggests the role of incumbency-based factors as an explanation for a decline in party support. The ideological position of the party (or being beyond left-and-right) had only a minor role. A discussion then focuses on the results of populists in power and the role of ideology in valence populism. Without an ideological core, once in power, voters punish (valence) populist party as they would any other, holding them to account for leadership and government performance.

Italy has long been a textbook case of government instability. Against this backdrop, the exceptional longevity of the Meloni government marks a clear reversal. However, the cabinet is ruling under the same institutional constraints that once made Italian governments short-lived and fragile. In this study, I seek to make sense of this exceptional stability tracing how potential stabilizing mechanisms have jointly operated across all the stages of the coalition life-cycle framework. Stability, I argue, has resulted from the convergence of multiple stabilizing mechanisms that have seldom aligned simultaneously in the Italian context. The main lesson from this deviant case lies in a paradox: Italy's most durable government in decades is promoting a constitutional reform intended to enhance stability, even though cohesive and disciplined coalitions can already achieve it without altering institutional rules.

This article empirically tests Kaare Strøm’s strategic approach to role theory, assessing whether MPs’ role choices correlate with their subsequent career outcomes. Strøm defines a parliamentary role as a “consistent pattern of political behavior” that functions as “an endogenous prescription” for how parliamentarians “may operate to maximize the likelihood of whatever political career outcomes they favor.” From this perspective, deputies strategically adopt roles as “game plans” to optimize their chances of re-candidacy, re-election, or advancement to party or legislative office. Using cluster analysis of deputies’ activities in the Italian Chamber of Deputies during the 17th legislature (2013–2018), this article identifies three role types: Constituency Members, Specialists, and Show Horses. It then estimates multinomial logit models to assess whether these roles predict re-election, legislative office, or governmental office in the subsequent legislature. Contrary to Strøm’s expectations, the results show no statistically significant relationship between role type and subsequent career advancement. By contrast, role adoption is more closely related to seniority, local political experience, and prior office-holding. These findings suggest that, at least in the Italian case, parliamentary roles are shaped less by forward-looking career calculation than by accumulated political experience.