In the aftermath of the Great Recession, populist parties rose to prominence across Europe, campaigning on the promise to do something about growing economic inequality by funding social welfare programs. We investigate if the pro-welfare reputation of European populist parties, either on the left or the right, is well deserved. We draw on a dataset of questions asked by members of parliament from nine European democracies over three decades. We want to know if members of populist parties spend more of their question time asking about social welfare than members of mainstream parties. Empirical analyses reveal no meaningful difference: populist parties ask about welfare but do not devote a larger share of their questions to the topic than non-populist parties, and rising economic inequality does nothing to change this dynamic. If anything, populist parties ask about welfare less. Our results suggest that populists talk the talk but – once elected – do not walk the walk.

This article examines the agency of national executives in shaping the reform agendas within the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) under the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). Through a comparative analysis of NRRPs drafting in Germany, France, Italy and Spain, and an in-depth longitudinal study of Italy, we argue that the partisan profile of national executives, to a significant extent, accounts for which reforms were included in the respective national plans, while the domestic usage of Europe by national executives explains how they went about embedding those reforms in the NRRPs. In terms of research design, we first match the reform priorities outlined in the political manifestos of the governing parties and those included in the NRRPs. Second, through a systematic analysis of press coverage, we sketch out how national executives leveraged (or not) Europe domestically during the drafting of their respective plans. Our findings contribute to shed light on the interplay between domestic political dynamics and EU-level requirements, demonstrating how governments navigated the tension between fulfilling their electoral mandates, building domestic support for their reform agendas and adhering to EU guidelines and constraints.

Since its inauguration, the coalition dynamics characterizing the Meloni government have been interrelated with managing one of the largest investment plans in Italian history: the Next Generation EU-funded recovery plan. This windfall represents both a historic opportunity for economic revitalization and an unprecedented external constraint for Italy. By linking two established research agendas, the coalition life cycle and the Europeanisation of domestic politics, this study examines the extent to which external constraints arising from EU membership may have affected coalition governance. Using a longitudinal design spanning almost three decades (1996-2023), the study finds that the implementation of the recovery plan is associated both with new trends and the accentuation of existing ones, including the strengthening of the prime minister’s role.

The emergence and spread of the Covid-19 emergency in Italy, as in the rest of the world, required parliaments to balance two priorities: ensuring the continuity of parliamentary work and protecting the health of their members and staff. If, in some legislative assemblies, the difficult balance between the right to health and the functioning of parliamentary institutions has been pursued through the implementation of measures that contemplate the use of remote participation and voting, the choices made by the Italian chambers have been more conservative, never coming to favor such solutions, at least in the plenary. This paper contributes to the debate on the digitization of parliamentary assemblies by analyzing the political reasons behind the decision to maintain the status quo in Italy, a country where the containment measures to limit the spread of Covid-19 were among the strictest in the world.

The identification of problem information is an important driver of political attention in parliament. This is widely acknowledged in the literature on party competition but there has been surprisingly little empirical research on the extent and when it matters. By relying on an extensive cross-country data set matching data on the policy content of parliamentary oral questions from ten European parliamentary democracies with well-established problem indicators (economy, immigration, and terrorism), this study sets out to answer these important questions. Our time series analysis reveals that not all problem indicators drive political attention in parliament to the same extent and that responsiveness varies based on differences in how government and opposition parties strategically take up problems as well as a partisan logic between left and right parties. While real world problem indicators can be a strong driver of parliamentary attention, that drive is still filtered through political and institutional processes.