More than a decade after the first introduction of the e-government policies, early enthusiasms on its immediate benefits on the quality of democracy have undergone critical review. E-government implementation worldwide has proved that technology alone does not necessarily provide more access and more participation. Massive technological intervention is not enough for re-inventing government online. Hence, other variables should be taken into consideration. Factors concerning political culture, cognitive frames and mentality, administrative traditions as well as the countryspecific peculiarities play a relevant role in determining if and how e-gov initiatives can success or fail. In this paper, it will be argued that any opportunity and push for change and actual influence on administrations, governments and societies, prompted by the new technologies, must endure important variables of political, social and cultural nature. At the end it's exactly politics -those elements related to political and government issues, and more in general to the socio-cultural context -that defines not only the basic e-policy characteristics but also its final accomplishment.We must therefore overturn the initial optimistic discourse: the political and socio-cultural variables overcome the technological one and we can state that politics (still) determines (e-)policy.

The recent and still enduring global economic and financial crisis deeply impacted the institutional framework in Italy and Spain by prompting a series of reforms, which ultimately re-shaped the local government features. Based on a qualitative comparative analysis of recent reforms, the author shows that (directly and indirectly) crisis-driven provisions have significantly impacted the local levels and changed the central/local relations in both countries. During the years of crisis, a decrease in local discretion in its three main facets (fiscal, administrative, and political/functional) has taken place. This outcome could both allow for a better understanding of how central and local governments have interacted during the crisis and to contribute to the formulation of more general considerations on local discretion and central/local relations in Italy and Spain.

The relationship between the remarkable changes that have occurred at the local level and the overlapping crises affecting Italy in recent years has yet to be fully tackled by political scientists. This article aims to contribute to the debate by arguing that anti-crisis measures have also produced structural effects that may actually weaken Italian local autonomies, suggesting the existence of an ongoing recentralisation. Several major questions are addressed: is such a trend inversion (from decentralisation to recentralisation) really taking place? Which dimensions should be analysed to detect it? What outcomes and effects have these measures provoked in Italian local government

Studies on federalism, regionalism and devolution often tackle the processes of institutional change in a country's polity merely as transitions from an institutional pattern to another, thus mainly focusing on the role of legal frameworks and Constitutional setting in the transition from an equilibrium to another. Such an approach overlooks the role of incremental dynamics: what happens after a new constitutional equilibrium has been reached? Does it stand still, crystallized by formal institutions, or does it evolve in time? This article illustrates the relevance of incremental institutional changes that occur after a major Constitutional reform and shows how an alteration in the distribution of resources among actors may heavily affect the territorial arrangement and the intergovernmental relations (IGRs) of a country. It focuses on the Italian case and the change in its IGRs between 2001 and 2016. Through a secondary analysis, a scrutiny of the trilateral game among the State, the Regions and the Local Authorities – played by reshaping and implementing the initial arrangement through gradual, piecemeal and layered modifications – will be conducted. Evidence is displayed through Dente (1997) resources (legal, political, financial and cognitive) framework. The main finding is that the change in the pattern turns out to be less visible, sometimes ambiguous and sticky, and more uncertain than a change of the pattern, but equally deep and effective. In the conclusion, some interpretative hypotheses for further research on the relevance of change in the pattern and its generalization for multi‐level system countries are proposed.

Although party system change has been widely explored, it is less so for the regional level. The article provides the first systematic attempt to discuss party system change at the regional level in Italy. Through a comprehensive overview of the five 1995–2015 regional elections, indicators of party system change, based on an original database, are explored. It will be showed that in the 2013–15 election cycle while party system fragmentation, volatility and recomposition reached their maximum high – parallel to what happened in 1995 – the level of bipolarism, one of the main features of Italian party system since the mid-1990s, dramatically dropped replaced by a three-pole configuration. These results, and their consistency with the relevant junctures at the national level in 1994 and 2013, may allow to state that a party system change at the regional level occurred and thus to consider 2013–15 elections as critical