For the past six years, the conversation about the UK and its role in the world has been centred upon Brexit. Yet, as we reach the sixth anniversary of the referendum, the world is changing rapidly around us: with the Covid crisis followed by the war in Ukraine and a global cost of living crisis.
UK in a Changing Europe’s The World Beyond Brexit conference brings together academics, politicians and other experts to discuss the state of geopolitics and the global economy and their implications for both the UK and the EU.
You will hear keynote interventions from Brexit negotiator Lord Frost and the Labour Party’s Shadow Foreign Minister David Lammy MP.
There will also be an opportunity to participate in a series of panel discussions. To see the full agenda head here. In-person tickets have sold out but you are still able to take part through live stream.
Reflecting on the challenges posed by the rise of populism, Marino De Luca analyses Brexit as a case study and proposes an active involvement of political parties to tackle this phenomenon.
Municipal elections were held in Italy on 3-4 October, with a further ballot being held in 65 municipalities on 17-18 October. Marino De Luca assesses what lessons can be learned from participation rates in the elections.
On 3 and 4 October 2021, votes were cast in Italy for the direct election of mayors and municipal councils. This involved 1,191 municipalities (1,153 in the 15 regions with ordinary statutes and 38 in the region with a special statute, Friuli Venezia Giulia) for 12,147,040 voters distributed over 14,505 sections.
In particular, there were elections in 19 provincial capitals, of which six were also regional capitals: Bologna, Milan, Naples, Rome, Turin and Trieste. In 65 municipalities there will be a ballot on 17 and 18 October. The ballot, in the Italian legal system, goes ahead in two cases. First, in all municipalities that are called “superiors” – with a population greater than 15,000 inhabitants (in the autonomous province of Trento, this threshold is lowered to 3,000) – if no candidate for mayor has managed to obtain 50%+1 of the valid votes in the first round; and second, in municipalities with fewer than 15,000 inhabitants (3,000 in the autonomous province of Trento), if the first round ended with a tie between two candidates.
The European Union is an unprecedented unification project that successfully preserves political peace and integrates Europe’s countries into a supra-national model. However, recent economic and political crises have shown that there are institutional problems that have undermined the EU and lost the trust of many citizens. In Italy after the ‘political earthquake’ of the 2013 national elections, the party system suffered a further shock in 2018 with the consolidation of the centre-right and Five Star Movement as the main competing political actors. In this context, the relationship with the EU has undergone numerous tensions, impacting directly on Italian public opinion and its perception of European institutions. This paper investigates whether and how the ‘exit’ issue from the EU affects Italian citizens, particularly how they react to a UK-style hypothetical referendum on leaving the EU. By analysing a 2019 voter study, it tries to identify clusters of Italian citizens by their attitude to European policies and a possible EU referendum.
Panel 9.3 Covid-19, Populism and Conspiracy Theories: Dynamics and Challenges in Europe
Focusing on the recent Covid-19 pandemic, this panel aims to explore the conspiratorial positions in the European context. In the contemporary health crisis, fears and threats have become a fertile ground for new and old imaginaries of conspiracies. Moreover, recent studies show a strong relationship between conspiratorial beliefs and populist attitudes, above all, regarding seeing the people as victims at elites’ hands. Indeed, the rapid growth of populist political parties around Europe in the last decades has coincided with the simultaneously expanded spread of conspiracy theories, showing how populists apply them to promote their policies and support for their parties. Conspiracy represents a rising key role in the European political background. Such increase is also because the EU itself is often observed as a technocratic conspiracy. Most essential studies have focused on the relationship between conspiracy theories and misinformation, ideologies, populism and partisanship. Other research, however, has focused on relationships with individuals, such as the self-social image, social status, income, trust in politics, and biases against further or political alienation. Furthermore, other approaches have highlighted the direct and indirect consequences of conspiracy on institutional trust and political participation. More generally, this can produce an extremisation process within political contexts and high political polarisation, both as state and process eroding trust in the democratic system. In this context, Europe is described in a dystopian image and blamed for creating crises, such as refugee issues, Greek debt, Brexit or the Covid-19 pandemic. In the last years, political disciplines have increased attention worldwide on the relationship between populism and conspiracy, developing relevant empirical perspectives. Recent studies have improved methodological approach, basing most of the contemporary research on quantitative methodologies, such as analysis of opinion surveys or big data, but finding a new exciting application in the qualitative approach, such as interviews and participant observations. This panel explores new perspectives to improve general knowledge of populism and conspiracy into the recent health crisis. For this reason, European comparative and single-case studies anchored to solid methodological and theoretical perspectives are welcome.
In order to submit your paper proposal: 1. you have to register to MySISP 2. once you logged in, click on “CONVEGNO 2021”: you’ll be redirected to your private area for the 2021 conference 3. click on “propose a paper”, select the panel where you want to propose the paper and fill in the form. Please note that no paper proposal will be accepted after the deadline.
In 2018, Italy appeared set to embark on a new era of populist government led by the Five Star Movement and the League. Yet less than three years since the 2018 election, the country now finds itself with a technocratic Prime Minister in the shape of Mario Draghi. Marino De Luca writes on what this turn of events tells us about the fate of populism in Italian politics.
A handout photo made available by Chigi Palace Press Office
Prologue
In this land, a word is often used in situations where a political class preserves a status quo while pretending to change it. Italians call it ‘leopardism’ after The Leopard, a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. It’s an illusion of change when everything stays the same. The result is a reinvention or rehabilitation process, like a ‘revolving door’ in the waiting room of the Italian political class.
In recent years, many scholars, mainly those focusing on populism, have analysed the role of ‘the people’ in politics. This has allowed us to understand how many political actors emphasize the central position of this term. Today, ‘the people’ has different meanings depending on how politicians use it in specific contexts. In this paper, the reference to ‘the people’ was measured using the following question: How do political leaders use the word ‘people’? The analysis was conducted on Twitter through the study of the accounts of the foremost political leaders in the UK during the 2019 general election campaign. The results highlight three key attitudes related to the use of ‘people’: a direct and immediate relationship between a leader and a wide people; a calling to a specific people, described as a strong and cohesive group; an appropriation of the voice of the people, grouping people without borders into the classic contraposition between a pure people and the corrupt elite [Read the full article here]
In June 2018, Giuseppe Conte became Italy’s prime minister.
Conte was a law professor with no prior political experience.
He was chosen as an independent leader at the head of a coalition of the Five Star Movement and Lega party.
Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte attends RAI’s broadcast talk Show Porta a Porta on January 08, 2019 in Rome, Italy.Alessandra Benedetti – Corbis | Corbis News | Getty Images
