This paper documents and analyses how populist discourse was used in very different ways by political entrepreneurs of the Italian right, leading to three specific manifestations. The empirical range of populist ideologies is identified through a frame analysis of party materials and connected to the varying political and cultural opportunities of different kinds of parties. However, it is argued that at the same time a common reliance on some common populist tenets constituted an innovative strategy of the Italian right, and that as an ideology one of it's distinctive functions has been to act as a conceptual glue in a coalition which would otherwise be deeply internally divided.

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This article seeks to explain models of inclusion of civil society actors in the immigration policy process (and particularly matters related to the social integration of immigrants) in Italy in terms of a model of ‘conflictual cooperation’ that has developed out of the theoretical literature on social movements and on interest intermediation. The article explores how the model of conflictual cooperation that appeared to have been established under the centre-left government in the second half of the 1990s was affected by the election of a centre-right government in 2001, with the latter downgrading relations with civil society and appealing directly to popular opinion on this issue.