This article addresses the potential role played by social media analysis in promoting interaction between politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens. We show that in a “Big Data” world, the comments posted online by social media users can profitably be used to extract meaningful information, which can support the action of policymakers along the policy cycle. We analyze Twitter data through the technique of Supervised Aggregated Sentiment Analysis. We develop two case studies related to the “jobs act” labor market reform and the “#labuonascuola” school reform, both formulated and implemented by the Italian Renzi cabinet in 2014–15. Our results demonstrate that social media data can help policymakers to rate the available policy alternatives according to citizens' preferences during the formulation phase of a public policy; can help them to monitor citizens' opinions during the implementation phase; and capture stakeholders' mobilization and de‐mobilization processes. We argue that, although social media analysis cannot replace other research methods, it provides a fast and cheap stream of information that can supplement traditional analyses, enhancing responsiveness and institutional learning.
Does European state building go hand in hand with European nation building? This article engages with the scholarly debate on the dynamic relationship between the construction of supranational political institutions that exert key functions of sovereignty and collective identities by investigating the extent to which the adoption of the Euro as a currency is associated with a decrease in the share of Europeans who identify exclusively with their nation and not with the European Union. In detail, by using a dynamic panel-data model on 26 European Union countries in the post-Maastricht period (1996–2017), our results show that the Euro has fostered European identity, leading to a small but significant decrease (-3%) in the share of Europeans with exclusive national identity.
Political economists show that outsiders (unemployed and temporary workers) support redistributive policies more than insiders (standard dependent workers) and infer outsiders' voting behavior from their desired degree of State intervention in the economy.However, it has been suggested that international interdependence is reshaping the political space along two dimensions: the traditional economic left-right scale, and an emerging cultural integration-demarcation dimension. How do outsiders behave in this two-dimensional political landscape? This research note answers this question by combining individual data from the latest five waves of the European Social Survey (2008-2016) with party positions provided by the Comparative Manifesto Project on 27 European countries. Integrating research based on party families with parties' policy positions, results show that the economic State-market dimension is still more linked to outsiders' voting behavior than the cultural integration-demarcation dimension.
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