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The ‘(party) politics of attention.’ Party competition and decentralist reforms: the Italian case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2018

Linda Basile
Linda Basile*
Affiliation:
Department of Social, Political, and Cognitive Sciences, University of Siena, Siena, SI, Italy
*
*Corresponding author. Email: basile7@unisi.it
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Abstract

This paper sheds light on the role played by political parties in influencing policy change, by connecting literature on party competition and agenda-setting and focusing on a single-issue domain, namely decentralization in Italy from 1948 to 2013. The article argues that major decentralist reforms usually followed electoral campaigns in which most parties focused attention on the issue. Such shifts in attention are caused by, among other things, the issue entrepreneurship activity undertaken by individual parties that are trying to influence the party system agenda and obtain electoral, office, or policy advantage. Contrary to the expectations of the issue entrepreneurship model, however, the analyses reveal that the entrepreneurship role on decentralization in Italy was not played by those parties that can be classified as ‘political losers’ in the party system; rather, in the case of the policy of decentralization in Italy, issue entrepreneurship activity is mostly explained by strategic considerations other than purely electoral ones.

Keywords

party system agendadecentralizationsaliencepunctuated equilibriumissue entrepreneurs
Type
Research Article
Information
Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica , Volume 48 , Special Issue 3: Policy Agendas in Italy , November 2018 , pp. 345 - 363
Copyright
© Società Italiana di Scienza Politica 2018 

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