Come si configurano i percorsi di militanza all’interno della Lega Nord? Quali processi di costruzione e rappresentazione di cultura, ideologia e identità emergono al suo interno? Che tipo di partito si incontra, spostando lo sguardo dall’attore politico, per osservare invece i processi situati che sostanziano l’organizzazione politica ? Questi i principali interrogativi alla base della ricerca etnografica condotta all’interno di due sezioni, l’una collocata in un piccolo centro della provincia veneta, l’altra in un contesto metropolitano lombardo.

The thesis investigates the impact of extra-individual factors on electoral participation, by providing a comprehensive theoretical framework aimed at highlighting the role of context. In particular, it analyzes the key-concepts of mobilization and interpersonal influence, with a focus on the Italian case. Both experimental and survey data are employed to answer the research questions. Concerning mobilization, main findings show that personal forms of contact, such as face-to-face interactions with party members, are more successful than impersonal forms, which prove to be ineffective. When looking at the interpersonal influence, the thesis shows that the exposure to political disagreement has differentiated effects on turnout, depending on the level of cohesiveness of the social circle where disagreement is experienced.

The work aims at addressing in a unified framework a variety environmental/contextual factors (geographical, campaign- and network-related). In doing so, theoretical and empirical relation between these various levels are investigated, as well as responses by which individuals can react to environmental stimuli. From the methodological side, hypotheses of the work are tested by means of multilevel regression models and agent-based simulations.

This dissertation studies the relationship existing between youth political organizations, music and national identity in contemporary Russia. In particular, it focuses on some of the most representative youth political organizations present in the city of St. Petersburg and aims at describing their contribution to the conceptualization of post-Soviet Russian national identity(ies), as captured through an analysis of their music.

Idea Management (IM) is the process of requesting, collecting, selecting and evaluating ideas to develop new and innovative products, services or regulations, or to improve existing ones. The process is supported by dedicated Idea Management systems (IMS), which lets people propose ideas, as well as rate and place comments on other users’ suggestions. When used in the civic domain, IM serves as a tool to engage citizens in processes of innovation of public services, laws, and regulations. A key ingredient in the success of IM is the community of participants. The larger the community, the more diverse views are likely to appear and diversity of views increases the chances of discovering valuable ideas that can lead to innovations. However, having a large number of people participating in IMS is a hard challenge; it requires an understanding of the people and their needs and designing the technology to match these characteristics. In this thesis, we aim at involving the society at large into IM processes. Achieving this ambitious goal requires integrating IMS with people’s everyday life tools and spaces of participation. We understand that tools for civic engagement should engage people on their own terms and should be readily available. We meet these requirements by proposing an approach that integrates IMS into common physical and virtual spaces of participation enabling people to participate in IM using ordinary tools and without having to step outside their daily habits. In a systematic and extensive study of the literature about technologies used to foster civic engagement in innovation processes, we found that the choice of technology and its “situated- ness” is essential in granting ease of public access and promoting inclusive processes of civic engagement. We also discovered that civic engagement technologies still have room to improve their use of multiple channels of participation. In this regard, we saw social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as having a strong potential to lower participation barriers and engage citizens, considering how pervasive these sites are today as daily tools. We show how the lessons learned can be applied in practice by presenting two solutions to increase participation in IMS. The first solution is a platform that extends IMS by integrating them into displays located in public spaces. From this experience, we found that taking the right instruments to where people actually are is important to address specific inequalities regarding access to technology. We also saw that the display represented for citizens not only an opportunity to make their voice being heard but also an occasion for socialization. The second solution is a model and tool that empower IMS through Facebook services. Here we found that the integration with Facebook facilitated participation by reducing the friction related to getting informed and involved in IM. Also, the participants reported that the familiarity and easy to use of Facebook features represented an advantage for participation. We informed the design of both solutions with large- and medium-scale data analysis studies on the behavior (individual and collective), practices, and motivation factors of IM communities’ participants.

The Eurozone crisis and the migration crisis generated a set of decisions at the EU level that aims to jointly mitigate the adverse consequences of economic and political turmoil. However, electoral successes by Eurosceptics at both EU and national levels and shrinking public support for the EU, as evidenced by Eurobarometer surveys, have shown that Euroscepticism has been surging in parallel with tighter cooperation of member states in crisis-ridden policy areas. Consequently, EU institutions have embraced the connecting potential of social media by implementing a series of online communication strategies aimed at selflegitimation and strengthening of public support for European integration. This study addresses the nature of Euroscepticism as reflected in online discussions via conducting a qualitative content analysis of Facebook debates unfolding on the pages of the European Parliament and the European Commission during the peak moments of the Eurozone crisis and the migration crisis. Moreover, the study identifies the public interpretations of different aspects of the two crises framed as existential for the process of European integration. The rhetorical analysis of the Facebook posts reveals how EU institutions utilize social media in order to respond to and normalise public discontent, whereas elite interviews triangulate the findings. The analysis of EU-focused transnational discussions complements the existing studies drawing on public opinion polls regarding public attitudes towards European integration, and re-conceptualises the common explanations for public Euroscepticism, mainly based on utilitarian or cultural hypotheses. The findings stemming from the rhetorical analysis and interviews demonstrate that EU crisis communication perpetuates the ingrained neo-functionalist and elitist modes of interaction despite the novel online communication setting.

Se si prende in considerazione il passato come un argomento della comunicazione politica, allora qual è l'effetto che i sentimenti producono sulla memoria? È possibile parlare di "nostalgia politica" all'interno di una realtà regionalistica? Il nazionalismo è oggetto della ricerca sul regionalismo? Nel Trentino Alto Adige, la regione di confine dominata dal plurilinguismo, la messa in scena dei sentimenti storici rivestì un'importanza particolare durante i decenni dei nazionalismi e regionalismi. Possiamo definire "nostalgici" quei sentimenti che implicavano forme di critica della civiltà di tipo conservativo e che contribuirono allo sviluppo di una coscienza della Heimat. Per mostrare il modo in cui le concezioni o le opinioni personali furono integrate o escluse dai luoghi propri della comunicazione interregionale, sarà necessario sviscerare le forme di espressione politica della nostalgia, intesa come sentimento di trasmissione della memoria.

This doctoral thesis seeks to explore the socio-political economy of antiretroviral treatment (ART) as an HIV prevention strategy in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and, specifically, in Mozambique. We begin with a look at the social construction of HIV in SSA as a ‘sexually transmitted disease’ despite its very low transmission efficiency through heterosexual sex. This inordinate focus on sexual transmission in SSA to the exclusion of other routes of transmission (i.e.: blood-borne transmission) not only allows new infections to continue to occur in areas that do not receive attention, but also has both fed and been fed by a political and social climate that paints an extraordinarily negative picture of those who are infected with HIV. Alternatives to the ineffective and misguided sexual behavior prevention paradigm are introduced to conclude Chapter 1. Chapter 2 then explores, in depth, the most efficacious form of HIV prevention currently in existence: antiretroviral treatment (ART) for infected persons. ART for an infected partner is 96% effective at preventing transmission of HIV to an uninfected partner. Due to this startlingly high efficacy and recent increases in coverage, we may be preventing more new cases of HIV annually through ART than through the use of condoms and abstinence combined in Mozambique. The financial implications of a paradigmatic shift to explicitly considering ART as a prevention strategy are discussed, particularly as they relate to PEPFAR's very specific regulations for the allocation of funds. As PEPFAR funding constitutes over 95% of Mozambique's HIV-specific funding, these regulations and earmarks have created deep path dependence and whittled away at national and local ownership of policy. The third chapter of this thesis then focuses on Mozambique's severe human resources for health constraints and current efforts in health systems strengthening. These strategies include task shifting and human resources scale-up, issues which, while being general to the health system, are also inordinately important for continued ART scale-up. The fourth and final chapter contains the case study in Maputo, Mozambique. This qualitative study attempts to examine the effects of the sexual behavior prevention paradigm on people living with HIV and receiving ART. As these patients are our best hope for halting the HIV epidemic, it will be important for us to view our decades-old prevention messages from their point of view and understand how these messages may also affect their adherence as well as their willingness to be tested initially and to enroll in treatment. The interviews were carried out with patients, guardians of pediatric patients and clinicians at two health facilities in Maputo. Analysis of these interviews supports the hypothesis that traditional prevention messages found in public health campaigns, the media and in health facilities themselves, may be creating and exacerbating stigma that discourages people living with HIV to be tested and treated.

Political inclusion of migrants is at the heart of contested scholarly and political debate. The increasing diversity of European democracies and the exclusion of a large part of the resident population from the political process raise questions about social cohesion and the quality of democracy. In the absence of voting rights for migrant residents, associations are often considered as an alternative for voice, representing migrants and defending their interest in the political process. Yet, little is known about the conditions favoring the political inclusion of migrant associations. Studies on migrants associations tend to consider migrant organizations as discrete units acting independently from each other. Yet, migrant associations do not act in a vacuum and are embedded in webs of relations as well as in a wider political context. Social movement scholars implicitly acknowledge an interaction between institutional and relational context in affecting collective action, but studies analyzing this interaction are scarce. Considering only one of the two structures in which associations are embedded might lead to wrong conclusions as to what fosters political inclusion. Thus, the objective of this study is twofold. First it attempts to link two traditions in the social movement literature: the political opportunity theory and the relational approach. Second, it aims at furthering our knowledge on the mechanisms linking the embeddedness of migrants associations in an institutional and a relational context and their political inclusion. Empirically, this study analyzes network structures in the field of immigration and the political inclusion of migrant organizations in Lyon and in Zurich. To analyze network structures the study draws on a relational approach to social movements that provides useful tools for comparing networks across contexts by defining a typology of modes of coordination of collective action. Modes of coordination are the mechanisms through which resources are allocated within collectivities but also how collective representation are elaborated as well as collective identities. The specific opportunities in the field of immigration draw on the citizenship approaches of nation-states to define the opportunities in the field. Two dimensions of political opportunty structures are defined. An institutional dimension, which refers to the rights and duties offered to immigrants as well as the institutional channels available to them, but also resources to actors acting in the field. The cultural dimension refers to the notions of citizenship and national identity that act as discursive opportunities and provide public recognition of different identities in the field. The main argument of this study is that the specific institutional and discursive opportunities in the field of immigration affect the network structure of migrant organizations and that the political inclusion of migrant organizations is affected by the interaction of both structures. Drawing on the social movement literature, this study analyzes the effect of the specific opportunity structure in the field of immigration on network structure and the political inclusion of migrant organizations. The results show that migrant organizations adapt to the specific opportunities when creating alliances, and the networks that emerge vary between the cities under study. Indeed, associations tend to create alliances on the basis of their access to institutional channels, and the publicly recognized identities in the field. Moreover, it shows that the interaction of the opportunity structure and the network structure affects political inclusion of migrant associations. Indeed, the embeddedness of associations in similar relational structures has different outcomes for political inclusion according to the context. The study concludes by stating that analyzing the interaction of specific political opportunity structures and network structures is necessary to get a better understanding of the conditions favoring or hindering the political inclusion of migrant organizations.

European democracies have witnessed the progressive affirmation of populist parties in the last two decades. This thesis draws from the suggestions of the theoretical literature on populism to study why European citizens support populist parties. In doing so, the aim of this thesis is twofold: on the one hand, it applies the ideational approach to populism to investigate support for populism from a comparative perspective; on the other hand, it seeks to understand how demand-side and supply-side factors contribute to explaining the cross-country and temporal heterogeneity in their electoral performances. This thesis focuses on two demand-side factors (i.e., social marginalisation and sociotropic concerns about economy) and two factors of the supply-side (i.e., liberal institutional arrangements and party competition). The results show that, first, populist parties attract significant support from citizens perceiving socially marginalised, especially in wealthy and globalised contexts; whereas sociotropic concerns about economy do not lead to higher support for populism. Second, liberal institutional arrangements increase the anti-institutional appeal of populist parties; whereas party competition on a core element of the far-right populist ideology (nativism) does not affect support for far-right populism to a great extent. This thesis shows that an approach that integrates both demand and supply side perspectives is beneficial to understand the reasons underlying support for populism.