This article was submitted to the ‘The Legacy of Giovanni Sartori’ symposium on IPSR/RISP – Italian Political Science Review. The goal of this note is to suggest an alternative approach to the of party family. The literature agrees that individual party families should be ideologically distinct and cohesive but maintains a broad understanding of ‘ideology’. This comes with conceptual and operational complications, including rarely explicit definitions of party family and frequently inconclusive empirical evidence. Instead, I suggest that the historically rooted ideological distinctiveness and uniqueness of party families should be conceived at the issue level. Accordingly, an alternative conceptualisation of party family is proposed: groups of parties whose patterns of issue salience ideologically reflect their historical origins. Importantly, this approach revolves around the identification of party families’ core issues, based on their cleavage/historical origins. Parties belonging to a party family will be the most consistent emphasizers of their core issues within their party system. This note provides a first discussion of how this alternative approach may provide party family scholars with greater clarity, both conceptually and in proposed empirical applications.

This article analyses the agony column ‘Voi e il cinema’, launched in November 1938 in Cine illustrato, one of the most popular film magazines of the time. ‘Voi e il cinema’ invited readers to share their acting aspirations, but also to send in photographs of themselves that might contain the defining feature of a diva: photogenicity. The magazine was flooded with images of ‘ordinary young Italian women’ that created an intermediate visual grammar. Focusing on both the photographs and the editors’ responses, the article reveals how shared consumption practices redefined the relationship between public and private space. It also highlights the distance of the readers’ self-representations from Fascist models and sheds light on the role of American star culture in creating the ‘modern’ subject. Although they were not politically opposed to Fascist models, the photographs reveal a strong desire for social change and the perception of such change, particularly in relation to traditional female roles.

What is the optimal level of questionnaire detail required to measure bilingual language experience? This empirical evaluation compares alternative measures of language exposure of varying cost (i.e., questionnaire detail) in terms of their performance as predictors of oral language outcomes. The alternative measures were derived from Q-BEx questionnaire data collected from a diverse sample of 121 heritage bilinguals (5–9 years of age) growing up in France, the Netherlands and the UK. Outcome data consisted of morphosyntax and vocabulary measures (in the societal language) and parental estimates of oral proficiency (in the heritage language). Statistical modelling exploited information-theoretic and cross-validation approaches to identify the optimal language exposure measure. Optimal cost–benefit was achieved with cumulative exposure (for the societal language) and current exposure in the home (for the heritage language). The greatest level of questionnaire detail did not yield more reliable predictors of language outcomes.

Pygoscelis penguins are valuable indicators of the effects of rapid warming in the Antarctic Peninsula. In the western Antarctic Peninsula, Adélie penguins show a declining population trend, whereas gentoo penguins are expanding. The notably low reproductive success of Adélie but not gentoo penguins at Ardley Island during the 2023/2024 breeding season provided an opportunity to explore the potential effects of weather conditions and food availability as possible determinants of reproductive output. We explore associations between reproductive output, air temperature, wind speed, wind chill temperature and accumulated rain and snow. As a proxy for food availability, we used data of penguins’ foraging trips, which reflect krill abundance. A late-winter storm at the end of October 2023 led to a record-low wind chill temperature and sustained snow cover, negatively affecting the number of eggs that hatched successfully and/or the number of chicks that survived the first days after hatching. The effects were similar for both species, yet for gentoo penguins chick survival in the late stage of the chick-rearing phase was remarkably higher, possibly due to high food availability and a longer nestling period. As previously suggested, the greater plasticity of gentoo penguins may allow them to mitigate the negative effects of environmental variability, potentially explaining this divergent breeding success despite unusually harsh meteorological conditions.

This article analyses the activities conducted by the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) in Spain between 1936 to 1943 to understand Italian policy towards the Francoist regime during that period. In doing so, this piece argues that it is important to adopt a political economy approach that looks at production, trade and industrial investments, always in relation to politics, diplomacy, law, culture and government. In fact, this article establishes that, for the main actors in Rome at the time, all these considerations were inseparable when it came to the Italian policy towards Franco’s Spain. Furthermore, I argue that the BNL initiatives are better understood when situated within the larger history of the Fascist regime in Italy and its imperialistic policies in the Mediterranean area.

The EU has been represented as a singular ‘Digital Empire’ speaking with one voice on matters of EU digital regulation. Closer examination of discrete areas of EU digital regulation reveals a more nuanced picture suggesting clear institutional divergence between the EU institutions regarding the substantive protection afforded by EU law. A detailed analysis of EU data protection adequacy decisions brings to the surface intra-EU tensions concerning the substance of core EU fundamental rights. This analysis reveals that the EU Commission has taken on a more prominent role in adequacy decision-making since the entry into force of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation at the expense of other relevant stakeholders. Furthermore, the Commission’s decisional practice does not align fully with the stance of the Court of Justice on the right to data protection. New sites of intra-EU human rights tensions are therefore uncovered with consequences for the legitimacy of the EU as a digital regulator and the role of the Commission as a guardian of the treaties.

The Stable Roommates problems are characterized by the preferences of agents over other agents as roommates. A solution is a partition of the agents into pairs that are acceptable to each other (i.e., they are in the preference lists of each other), and the matching is stable (i.e., there do not exist any two agents who prefer each other to their roommates and thus block the matching). Motivated by real-world applications, and considering that stable roommates problems do not always have solutions, we continue our studies to compute “good-enough” matchings. In addition to the agents’ habits and habitual preferences, we consider their networks of preferred friends and introduce a method to generate personalized solutions to stable roommates problems. We illustrate the usefulness of our method with examples and empirical evaluations.

Building on previous scholarship on “genetic capital” and the politicization of animal economies, this paper examines how animal breeds and their transnational movement became geopolitical issues in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. In particular, it examines how the French government’s efforts to emulate English and Spanish wool pro-duction, and to overcome the economic advantage stemming from its rivals’ superior sheep breeds, intensified in the wake of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Despite bans on the exportation of live sheep from Britain and Spain, the French strove to improve their flocks through illicit imports and diplomatic agreements. These efforts culminated in the 1760s, as the Bureau of Commerce began to collaborate with agriculturalists, naturalists, diplomats, and smugglers to bring superior breeds of sheep across the Anglo-French maritime border and the Pyrenean frontier with Spain. These projects developed in tandem with new conceptions of the permanence of race and breed, according to which animals would retain their characteristics in new climates and environments. Combining perspectives from economic, agricultural, political, and cultural history, this article uses the concept of animal mercantilism to open up the geopolitical stakes inherent in understandings of animals, race, and climate.

Two months after its premiere in Leipzig, Ernst Krenek’s Leben des Orest (1930) came to the Berlin Kroll Opera, a notorious centre for experimental, modernist productions. Inevitably, critics compared the two productions, much to the Berlin production’s detriment. In particular, critics faulted the Berlin stage designs by Greek-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. I argue that this reception reflected a fundamental divergence in Krenek and de Chirico’s neoclassicism, which was only exacerbated by how neither Krenek nor de Chirico’s neoclassicism aligned with pre-existing expectations about the Kroll Opera’s production aesthetic, as exemplified in Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (staged at the Kroll in 1928). Attending to these differences not only explains the troubled reception of Leben des Orest at the Kroll, but also provides fertile ground to examine the complicated and sometimes contradictory meanings ascribed to neoclassicism in the interwar period, especially as it moved between media and across national borders.

Novel utility computing paradigms rely upon the deployment of multi-service applications to pervasive and highly distributed cloud-edge infrastructure resources. Deciding onto which computational nodes to place services in cloud-edge networks, as per their functional and non-functional constraints, can be formulated as a combinatorial optimisation problem. Most existing solutions in this space are not able to deal with unsatisfiable problem instances, nor preferences, i.e., requirements that DevOps may agree to relax to obtain a solution. In this article, we exploit Answer Set Programming optimisation capabilities to tackle this problem. Experimental results in simulated settings show that our approach is effective on lifelike networks and applications.