Multiple crises and changes in individual attitudes and behaviours towards politics, policy and polity in Southern Europe

Abstract

In the first quarter of the twenty-first century Southern Europe was hit much more severely than the rest of the continent by a series of unprecedented and multifaceted crises, such as the global recession and the sovereign debt crisis, the massive inflows of migrants and the Covid-19 pandemic. In these moments of emergency and radical uncertainty citizens and political elites tend to react by adapting their general attitudes, policy preferences and political behaviours. Thus, in Southern European countries, in particular Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, crises acted as catalysts for political change, at the level of party systems and national executives, as well as policy innovations at both the national and supranational level. Against this background, this panel is particularly, but not exclusively, interested in contributions that addresses topics such as attitudes towards democracy and political representation, technocratic attitudes and evaluations of technocratic executives’ performance, trends in political support and satisfaction with democracy, electoral behaviour and vote for populist and anti-system parties, preferences for national and EU-level policy responses to the different crises, and public support for the EU with a particular interest on its specific, policy-oriented dimension of European solidarity. Even if the panel focuses on Southern Europe, we are interested in comparative studies that include also countries from other European regions. We invite both descriptive and causal papers employing individual and/or aggregate level data. Quantitative analyses are preferred but also qualitative studies are welcome.

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