scholarly journals Faraway, so close: a spatial account of the Conte I government formation in Italy, 2018

Author(s):  
Daniela Giannetti ◽  
Andrea Pedrazzani ◽  
Luca Pinto

Abstract The formation of the ‘yellow-green’ government that took office in Italy after the general election held on 4 March 2018 looked puzzling to many commentators as the two coalition partners – the Five Star Movement and the League – appeared to be quite distant on the left–right continuum. In this article, we argue that despite being widely used in the literature, a unidimensional representation of parties' policy positions on the encompassing left–right scale is inadequate to explain the process of coalition governments' formation. We focus first on coalition outcomes in Italy in the period 2001–18. Our statistical analysis including, among other variables, parties' policy distance on the left–right dimension performs rather well until 2013 but fails to predict the coalition outcome in 2018. To solve the puzzle, we propose a two-dimensional spatial account of the Conte I government formation in which the first dimension coincides with the economic left–right and the second one is related to immigration, the European Union issues and social conservatism. We show that the coalition outcome ceases to be poorly understandable once parties' policy positions are measured along these two dimensions, rather than on the general left–right continuum.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 3265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anca Mehedintu ◽  
Georgeta Soava ◽  
Mihaela Sterpu

In this paper we study the evolution of remittances and risk of poverty threshold for nine emerging countries in the European Union and analyzed the evolution and trend of the share of remittances in the risk of poverty threshold. The analysis was performed on data taken from the Eurostat database for the period 2005–2017. The statistical analysis of the data showed that the evolution of both remittances and risk of poverty threshold was heavily influenced by the global economic crisis. Although after the crisis, the risk of poverty threshold has seen a growing trend in all emerging countries, the remittances have experienced sinuous variations, dramatic declines for some of the countries (drastically for Romania and Latvia) and significant increases for others (Hungary). The results of the analysis using time-dependent regression models lead to the conclusion that, although the share of remittances in risk of poverty threshold diminished abruptly after the 2009 economic crisis, in the short term it is expected to maintain a growth trend for most of the analyzed countries (Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia), followed downward tendency after 2018 for Bulgaria and Romania, and after 2020 for Hungary and Lithuania. For Latvia and Estonia, both quadratic and cubic models estimate a decreasing evolution.


Author(s):  
Ciprian Iftimoaei ◽  
Cristian-Ionuţ Baciu

In the three decades since the collapse of communism in Romania (1989), human resources have gone through several distinct moments in the process of social and economic transition, from the state economy to the market economy: (1) the period 1990-2007 characterized by declining employment, rising unemployment, low wages, employee poverty, labour migration to developed countries; (2) the period 2007-2019 in which Romanian employees experienced the benefits of the European integration process, which meant economic macrostability, increased foreign investment, projects financed by European operational programs that led to increased living standards, increased employment, labour crisis; (3) the period beginning with the 2020 pandemic year and the economic and social crisis, the effects of which are already quantified by official statistics. This paper proposes a retrospective analysis of the evolution of labour resources in Romania, after joining the European Union. The methodology used combines descriptive statistical analysis (labour resources, activity rate, employment rate, unemployment rate, average net earnings), hierarchical cluster analysis to compare the employment situation in Romania in the year of accession to the European Union (2007) versus the year before the onset of the pandemic crisis (2019) and the simple linear regression analysis, having as an independent variable the „unemployment rate” and as a dependent variable „the number of employees”. Simple linear regression is used not only for teaching purposes, but in addition to testing the link between variables, we wanted to find out how much the number of employees decreases if the unemployment rate increases by one percentage point nationwide. The data used come from the TEMPO Online database of the National Institute of Statistics and were processed with the SPSS.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (Extra-B) ◽  
pp. 37-46
Author(s):  
Lin Peiyuan

The article provides a statistical analysis of the trends in the development of e-commerce in the world in general and in China in particular, a comparative legal analysis of the system of legal regulation of key aspects affecting the functioning of e-commerce in the European Union and in the People’s Republic of China (further PRC). The research methodology is based on a systematic approach and includes the methods of the general scientific group (analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction), as well as special methods: statistical analysis, content analysis of scientific literature on the research topic, the method of comparative legal analysis. As a result of the study, the author came to the conclusion that the legislation of China and the European Union regarding the regulation of e-commerce is aimed at fundamentally different goals: in the EU, legislation is aimed at protecting private transactions and trade, and for China, the priority is the development of legal norms that allow the state as much as possible control electronic commercial flows and procuring a cybersecurity in e-commerce sector.


2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (10) ◽  
pp. 1349-1370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Manow ◽  
Holger Döring

Voters who participate in elections to the European Parliament (EP) apparently use these elections to punish their domestic governing parties. Many students of the EU therefore claim that the party—political composition of the Parliament should systematically differ from that of the EU Council. This study shows that opposed majorities between council and parliament may have other than simply electoral causes. The logic of domestic government formation works against the representation of more extreme and EU-skeptic parties in the Council, whereas voters in EP elections vote more often for these parties. The different locations of Council and Parliament are therefore caused by two effects: a mechanical effect—relevant for the composition of the Council—when national votes are translated into office and an electoral effect in European elections. The article discusses the implications of this finding for our understanding of the political system of the EU and of its democratic legitimacy.


Author(s):  
Artur Zimny ◽  
Karina Zawieja-Żurowska

This chapter attempts to analyze the housing market. In particular, it attempts to modelling through a statistical analysis the housing market in member states of the European Union.


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Narisong Huhe ◽  
Daniel Naurin ◽  
Robert Thomson

We test two of the main explanations of the formation of political ties. The first states that political actors are more likely to form a relationship if they have similar policy preferences. The second explanation, from network theory, predicts that the likelihood of a tie between two actors depends on the presence of certain relationships with other actors. Our data consist of a unique combination of actors' policy positions and their network relations over time in the Council of the European Union. We find evidence that both types of explanations matter, although there seems to be variation in the extent to which preference similarity affects network evolution. We consider the implications of these findings for understanding the decision-making in the Council.


Author(s):  
Mads Dagnis Jensen ◽  
Peter Nedergaard

This chapter examines Denmark’s different positions on European Union policies which vary in terms of the degree to which sovereignty has been transferred to the EU. Specifically, it traces trade policy (very high transfer), agricultural policy (high transfer), internal market (moderate transfer), and opt-outs (low transfer) diachronically to illuminate the extent to which positions have changed over time and the underlying factors behind these changes. While the level of politicization varies between the policy areas, and party political differences play a role, the general picture that emerges is interest based. According to this approach, Denmark is positive towards giving up sovereignty regarding policies it benefits from economically, while it is more reluctant towards policies involving the transfer of sovereignty and money that are not offset by net economic benefits. In this chapter, this is demonstrated through an analysis stretching back to the decades before Danish membership to the European Union. Denmark also seems to change policy positions when the economic benefits for the country changes, as seen in the case of the Common Agricultural Policy.


Author(s):  
Giovanni Di Lieto ◽  
Bruno Mascitelli

This paper explores the meaning of the Italian anti-establishment voting and whether the Five Star Movement’s anti-establishment label is appropriate. More specifically the investigation addresses the policies of the Five Star Movement towards the now creaking European Union, especially as growing Euroscepticism has been boosted by the Brexit referendum and the Trump dismissal and disdain for the European Union. In doing so, the paper examines the historic approach of so-called ‘anti- establishment’ parties that have had an almost ‘normal’ occurrence within the Italian political environment since the end of the Second World War. In this sense the paper concludes that addressing parties and systems as anti-establishment does little to help our understanding of this most fluid political period in Italy and across Europe.


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