Andrea Pritoni

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Verified

Andrea verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD in Political Science
• Professor (Associate) at University of Bologna

Cooperation in lobbying is central to policymaking, and the formation of coalitions is a frequently used strategy by interest groups seeking to influence policy outcomes. While coalition formation between like-minded organizations is well documented, the literature has so far overlooked interest groups networking with groups that pursue opposed pol...

Despite the growing interest in the policy work and analytical capacities of bureaucracies, these dimensions have not been treated as central to characterizing and understanding the role of senior civil servants in policymaking, which is usually conceptualized in terms of their relationship with policymakers or other organizational and societal fac...

La capacité d’analyse des politiques est une source essentielle de bonne gouvernance. Bien que les décideurs puissent acquérir cette capacité de différentes manières, il est clair que les ressources internes en termes de capacité analytique est stratégique pour faciliter l’élaboration des politiques. Ces ressources peuvent se concentrer dans des ty...

The relevance and impact of political scientists’ professional activities outside of universities has become the focus of public attention, partly due to growing expectations that research should help address society’s grand challenges. One type of such activity is policy advising. However, little attention has been devoted to understanding the ext...

This introduction to the ‘Politics in Italy 2024’ special issue sheds light on the main events that unfolded during the course of the last year. A central focus is on the passing of Silvio Berlusconi, discussing his legacy and the consequences of his death for the Italian party system. This introduction also discusses the extent to which Fratelli d...

Studying how public administrations proactively search for information from interest groups provides a new perspective for a better understanding of how bureaucratic policymaking works and how civil servants interact with interest groups. Building on data collected through an online survey submitted to approximately 700 high-level public servants i...

This paper focuses on the advisory role of political scientists in Southern European countries. Studying the social and policymaking impact of political scientists in Southern Europe is relevant from at least three points of view: firstly, because they are social scientists who make policymaking one of their main fields of investigation; secondly,...

One of the main enabling reforms included in the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan is that of competition. In this regard, past pro-competitive attempts have usually disappointed expectations , above all due to the counter-mobilization of very powerful interest groups, able to act as veto-players in the policy process. This article seek...

Policy analytical capacity is a pivotal source of good governance. Although this capacity can be acquired by decision makers in various ways, it is clear that the internal stock of analytical capacity is strategic in terms of supporting policymaking. This stock can be concentrated in specific types of organisational roles (like policy professionals...

This article focuses on how the 20 main Italian interest groups evaluated the contents of the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). In comparing its two versions (Conte Draft and Draghi Plan), we want to understand whether the change of government impacted on the contents of the NRRP and, in turn, on interest groups' preference atta...

This contribution provides a comprehensive and systematic review of the main debates and empirical evidence of interest groups’ lobbying in Italy. The insufficient academic attention on interest groups in Italy mirrors the enduring lack of a public regulatory framework of lobbying. The main legislative projects and sparse policy outcomes are review...

This contribution provides a comprehensive and systematic review of the main debates and empirical evidence of interest groups’ lobbying in Italy. The insufficient academic attention on interest groups in Italy mirrors the enduring lack of a public regulatory framework of lobbying. The main legislative projects and sparse policy outcomes are review...

Il sistema politico italiano viene spesso biasimato per la scarsa capacità di rispondere alle esigenze del paese. Tuttavia, a critiche mirate e fondate, talvolta se ne associano altre più superficiali. In un’epoca in cui è sempre più difficile orientarsi nel bombardamento quotidiano di informazioni, il manuale combina un focus analitico-descrittivo...

To date, no systematic attempt has been made to describe the main features of the Italian policy advisory system. In particular, we know very little about the role of political scientists within it. This study addresses precisely this gap in the literature. First, by presenting original data derived from an online survey to which 177 Italian politi...

The so-called «Recovery Fund» represented a perhaps unrepeatable opportunity for Italian interest groups to see their own requests transformed into public policies. This article focuses on how the most important organized interests mobilized and contributed to the public debate on the Recovery Fund by attempting to answer three main research questi...

Over the past few months, (very) much of the Italian public debate dealt with two closely related issues: the COVID-19 pandemic and the policy instruments at disposal to national and supranational political actors to mitigate its consequences, especially from a socioeconomic point of view. On this, the main political tool was the so-called 'Next Ge...

The purpose of this article is twofold: to explore the dynamics of party leadership change in Italy, and to try to assess which (if any) characteristics of the leadership race (LR) to appoint (or re-appoint) the party leader, in combination with other conditions, could favour leadership re-selection in office at the end of the term, rather than a m...

Academics are often accused of being secluded in their "ivory towers", focused on research and teaching but uninterested in, or unable to engage with, the public debate. If this is actually the case, under what conditions and at what particular moment is this likely to change? Following on three relevant dimensions-the visibility of political scien...

The main purpose of this paper is to detect the reasons for party leaders' persistence or departure from the office, starting from the moment they are selected or re-selected. More specifically, we try to assess which (if any) characteristics of the leadership race (LR) called to appoint (or re-appoint) the party leader, in combination with other c...

Nonostante un processo decisionale sempre più frammentato e mutevole, che sembrerebbe vincolare i governi a rispondere velocemente (e, spesso, unilateralmente) alle sfide poste dalla quotidianità, la maggior parte delle politiche approvate nelle democrazie contemporanee registra il fattivo coinvolgimento dei gruppi di interesse, abili a premere sui...

Interest groups are crucial players of policy processes, not only as providers of information or political capital, but also as promoters of particular frames. By combining process-tracing, frame analysis and semi-structured interviews to representatives of interest groups and key policymakers, this paper aims to shed light on the single and yet pa...

Over the past three decades, governments have recurrently intervened in higher education. Over time, significant changes have occurred in inherited national governance modes. These reforms have been assessed in different ways, such as by emphasising the shift to the more supervisory role of the State, or the increasing privatisation and marketisati...

In a book published in 1998, Baumgartner and Leech argued that interest group research was characterized by “elegant irrelevance.” Ten years later, Beyers and colleagues linked this to a number of conceptual, methodological and disciplinary barriers which render(ed) the accumulation of knowledge in this bulk of literature difficult. Are those same...

The policy cycle framework originates from the idea of organizing and ordering the complexity of policymaking. It is a heuristic tool through which different stages of the ongoing and never-ending dynamics of policy processes can be segmented and then analyzed. It was originally proposed by Lasswell (1956), the founder of modern policy analysis and...

Per lungo tempo, la scienza politica italiana ha dedicato scarsa attenzione allo studio dei gruppi di interesse e del lob-bying. Tuttavia, negli ultimi anni, questa tendenza è andata largamente attenuandosi, e la conoscenza a disposizione degli studiosi è certamente più ampia e dettagliata che non qualche anno fa. Questo saggio si propone di sistem...

How much do Italian interest groups undertake their advocacy/lobbying activities at the EU level? How often have groups gained access to different EU level institutions? This paper presents an original conceptualisation for the concept of ‘interest group Europeanisation’, which takes into account both the percentage of EU lobbying and access to EU i...

This article aims at focusing on four main features of the European elections that were held on 26 May 2019. Firstly, it analyses electoral turnout, both from a diachronic and a geographical point of view. Secondly, it presents electoral data and identifies winners and losers of the vote, not only by comparing 2019 E.U. results to 2014 E.U. results...

This special issue is concerned with the study of interest groups in Italy, focusing on their roles in policy-making and on how lobbying varies throughout the policy cycle. This introductory essay illustrates the common analytical framework followed by all contributions to the special issue, which reconstruct five policy processes in the period of...

In this article, we analyze the influence that crucial interest groups had with regard to one of the most debated policy processes in recent years: the so-called «Jobs Act» (law no. 183/2014) enacted by the Renzi government. We focus on the interplay between the government and the main stakeholders in labor market policy, by reconstructing the deci...

LOBBYING IN TEMPI DIFFICILI a cura di Renata Lizzi e Andrea Pritoni 157 Renata Lizzi e Andrea Pritoni Lobbying in tempi difficili. Gruppi di interesse e policy-making nell'Italia della disintermediazione 181 Andrea Pritoni e Stefano Sacchi I gruppi di interesse e il «Jobs Act»: lobbying con quali effetti? 213 Fabrizio Di Mascio, Paolo Feltrin e Ale...

Over the last three decades, governments have recurrently intervened in higher education. Over time, significant changes have occurred in inherited national governance modes. In Europe, these governmental policies have attempted to abandon the inherited Continental governance mode in favour of an "autonomistic" mode because universities have been g...

The questions this article wants to address are the following: how important are European policies for Italian interest groups? How often have groups actively sought access to different EU level institutions and agencies in order to influence public policy? And, above all: what are the causes of more or less 'Europeanisation'? Theoretically, the co...

YOU CAN READ FOR FREE HERE: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-public-policy/article/do-policy-instruments-matter-governments-choice-of-policy-mix-and-higher-education-performance-in-western-europe /DE469262F0D9114864DE5CA593525505/share/ef3f43c85386e879ebee1f4d30cbc6ac95739f76 ABSTRACT Governments pursue their goals by adopting v...

With a very few exceptions, scholars have devoted little attention to the analysis of the Italian interest system so far. This paper aims to address exactly this lacuna. Following a diachronic perspective, the combination of a population ecology approach with the analysis of interest groups’ access to parliament makes it possible to measure the lev...

Although many interest groups work together perpetually, most academic studies agree that coalition formation does not lead to more influence. In this article, we try to explain these puzzling findings. While former research generally tends to frame the decision of forming an interest group coalition as a strength, in this paper, we argue that coal...

In any democratic system, the question of whether governments pay attention to citizens' needs and requests represents a crucial component of democratic quality. But what conditions favour this fundamental democratic process? This article compares policy priorities identified by public opinion with the actual legislative production in Italy, Spain...

Over the last 30 years, governments have continuously adjusted their Higher Education policies to make universities more efficient (achieving more by spending less) and more effective (by increasing the percentage of graduates, by reducing the number of university dropouts and by fo-cusing more on the third mission). At the core of governmental end...

Not all general elections can be considered as being equal: some are placed in continuity with the previous political phase and therefore do not change the most relevant features of the party and political system; others, however, tend to represent a watershed between distinct political phases. Without a doubt, the 4 March 2018 Italian general elec...

The topic of the 'Europeanisation' of national interest groups has been gaining momentum in interest group research in recent years: this is because the institutional environment in which European and national interest organisations operate is increasingly a multilevel arena consisting of various national arenas and the European Union level. On the...

This paper focuses on the reasons that Italian interest groups decide to lobby together with like-minded groups (‘friends’), or engage in networking activity with groups that have conflicting interests (‘foes’), in order to influence public policy. How often do Italian interest groups recur to these lobbying strategies? What favours the constructio...

Chi sono le più influenti lobby italiane? Come e quanto riescono ad incidere sulle decisioni pubbliche? E tutto questo che effetti ha sul funzionamento e la qualità della nostra democrazia? Nel rispondere a tali importanti interrogativi, l’autore mette a confronto i tratti salienti della politica degli interessi così come è andata strutturandosi ne...

As a result of domestic pressure or international prescription, many national higher education systems (HESs) in Europe have undergone structural changes over the last thirty years, primarily to enhance the overall performance – defined as students’ access, quality of teaching and excellence in research – of universities. As such, almost all of the...

The topic of the 'Europeanisation' of national interest groups has been gaining momentum in interest group research in recent years: this is because the institutional environment in which European and national interest organisations operate is increasingly a multilevel arena consisting of various national arenas and the European Union level. On the...

Over the last thirty years, many national higher education systems (HESs) in Europe have undergone structural changes following domestic pressure or international prescriptions. These changes have mainly been intended to enhance the overall university performance – conceived as students' access, quality of teaching and excellence in research. Almos...

Although the study of interest group politics is a relatively small field within political science, over the last fifteen years an impressive amount of empirical research on interest groups has been produced. Unfortunately, Italy has not been infected with this renewed attention to interest group politics, and the Italian case is still absent in an...

Within interest group research, scholars following the population ecology perspective mainly look at the demographic features of populations and systems under scrutiny: density and diversity represent the main dimensions investigated. Even though, in recent years, an impressive amount of literature on this topic has been produced, there has been ne...

The first and foremost task of all governments is to make decisions. Consequently, studies on governments should deal above all with their ability to produce legislation. To this respect, this paper analyzes the legislative productivity of 112 parliamentary governments in 12 Western European democracies (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany,...

The Renzi government is currently under scrutiny by many scholars of Italian politics. Their main focus is either on the Prime Minister’s leadership and communication skills or on government legislative activity with a particular emphasis on the relationship between the government and parliament. However, these studies still lack an analysis of the...

In any democratic system, government responsiveness is a crucial component of democratic quality: the more a government is able to pass legislation matching its previous electoral promises, the more it has to be considered as being 'responsive' and, in turn, the more elections are decisive and citizens 'matter'. Yet, even more important than the co...

The foremost task of all governments is to make decisions. Ultimately, governments must govern and should therefore be analysed based on what they did, what they did not do, and what they did badly. Over the course of the so-called 'First Republic', scholars generally referred to Italian governments as actors 'surviving without governing' because t...

There has been neither systematic analysis of, nor empirical research into, the Italian interest system so far. This paper aims to address exactly this lacuna: following a diachronic perspective, I count how many politically active interest associations populated the Italian system between 1996-98 and 2013-15. Yet, this paper also takes a step furt...

For a long time, the study of interest groups has been considered as a relatively small field within political science. In spite of this, over the last fifteen years an impressive amount of empirical research on interest groups has been produced. The main aim of this paper is exactly to review this ‘newer’ literature, in order to answer the followi...

The recent global financial crisis has contributed to a resurgence of academic interest in financial sector groups and their ability to 'get what they want' in policymaking. A widespread belief is that financial regulations are actively designed by, and intended to serve the interests of, the regulated actors themselves. In other words, banks (and...

The first and foremost task of all governments is to make decisions and to produce legislation. With regard to this, this paper analyses the legislative productivity of 104 parliamentary governments in 12 Western European democracies (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and UK) from 1990 t...

The question of who wins or loses in the policy process lies at the heart of recent research into both interest groups and public policy. However, one of the most difficult challenges when empirically analysing interest groups consists in knowing exactly how to measure their influence: despite the fact that this question has been addressed by polit...

The so-called OBI project (‘Organization of Business Interests’), which Schmitter and Streeck carried out in the early 1980s, provided subsequent scholars with a framework for the analysis of interest groups. One major contribution in this respect was the development of two different sets of opposite associational logics: on the one hand, interest...

The present article focuses on the interaction between political decision makers and trade unions in Italy through an historical approach, embracing two decades of welfare reforms. The aim is thus to shed light on party-group relationships, through a rigorous definition of the changing modes of interaction between the two and the study of the key e...

Less than fi ve years after its formal establishment, the National Council of PDL – which met on 11-16-2013 at the ‘Palazzo dei Congressi’ in Rome – decided for the dissolution of the party and the subsequent confl ence of all its members and leaders in a new political entity which was called again Forza Italia. A party that – in the first two year...

For a long time, the study of interest groups has not been the most frequented area of research in Italian political science. During the last decades, scholars working in policy studies have revived the topic by analysing the role of interest groups in the policy process; yet they only have provided sectional analyses of the phenomenon. In this pap...

The present contribution aims to shed light on the interaction between political decision-makers and interest groups (IGs) through an historical approach, embracing two decades of Italian pension reforms. The aim is thus to focus on party–group relationships, through a rigorous definition of the changing modes of interaction between the two and the...

This article deals with the empirical analysis of a policy sector which - for a number of reasons (last but not least the recent economic and financial crisis) - in recent years has become an increasingly important one: that of banks and insurance companies. In doing so, I focus on eighteen interest groups that can be differentiated in employers gr...

The aim of this paper is to empirically measure the influence of the Italian Association of Banks (ABI) with respect to three policy processes, each of which being oriented towards the liberalization of the Italian banking policy sector, between 2006 and 2012. Theoretically, I argue that interest groups’ influence depends upon: the quality of their...

A growing number of Italian political scientists has recently rediscovered the analysis of interest groups. Nevertheless, comparative research in Italy is still scarce, and the most recent policy studies focus only on sector-based aspects: in other words, to the best of our knowledge, there are no systematic empirical analyses of the Italian «Inter...

A growing number of political scientists has recently rediscovered the analysis of interest groups. Among the studies that are now crowding this traditional research field, in this work I concentrate on those who deal with the empirical measurement of interest groups influence over the policy-making process. In this sense, I thus analysed the influ...

The question of who wins or loses in the policy-making process lies at the very heart of recent research into both interest groups and public policy. However, one of the most difficult challenges when empirically analyzing interest groups consists in knowing exactly how to measure their respective influence: despite the fact that this question has...

This paper aims to address two very interesting topics in political science: firstly, the possibility of measuring governments’ decision-making potential; and secondly, the actual legislative productivity of such governments. As regards the first of these aims, I have created a multidimensional index combining what I assume to be the most important...

In the latest decades, the «Will it last?» question about parliamentary governments has received a growing attention by political scientists. However, only a few studies focus on the Italian case, and scholars have not found a satisfactory interpretation for the huge differences characterizing the transition from the First to the Second Italian Rep...

One of the first things parties entering a government coalition do is to decide how they will share the ministerial offices among themselves. Without reaching agreement on this issue, no coalition can take office. For this reason, it is easy to understand why portfolio allocation is so important. In this respect, this paper tries to highlight the d...

Not only Italian scholars have (generally) poorly studied interest groups, but, when they did, they (almost) only analyzed trade unions (Cgil, Cisl, Uil) and employers associations (especially Confindustria). However, it is quite difficult to justify the substantial neglect that Italian political scientists set aside of banks association (Abi) and...

This paper aims at answering the following questions: which dimensions best describe governments' decision-making potential in parliamentary democracies? How Italy (1979-2008), Germany (1976-2009), Great Britain (1979-2010) and Spain (1982-2008) can be categorized in terms of such dimensions? I try to achieve these aims by proposing a complex, mult...

This paper aims at answering the following questions: how can we hypothesize the relationship between Italian governments and pressure groups, in “determining” welfare policies? How much governments are able to maintain their policy “ideal points” at the end of the decision-making process? How much, on the contrary, pressure groups are able to obta...

L'obiettivo di questo scritto è quello di rispondere alle seguenti domande: quali sono le dimensioni che, nell'ambito delle democrazie parlamentari, meglio descrivono il potenziale decisionale dei governi? Come possiamo classificare alcune democrazie dell'Europa occidentale, ed esattamente Italia (1979-2009), Germania (1976-2009) e Spagna (1982-200...