This article presents an overview of current understandings in the study of political and civic engagement and participation, drawing in particular on innovations which have emerged from the PIDOP project. For the purposes of the article, ‘engagement’ is defined as having an interest in, paying attention to, or having knowledge, beliefs, opinions, attitudes or feelings about either political or...

Social capital is a concept that can facilitate a friendly merger between sociological and economic theories of political behavior. Rational-choice theories emphasize resources and constraints, and political-cultural theories focus on normative rules and habitual behavior; social capital integrates both. Mutual obligations instituted among members of society function as “credit slips” which are...

Based on the view of morality proposed by the Moral Foundations Theory, this paper investigates whether voting intention is associated with moral foundation endorsement in not perfectly bipolar electoral contexts. Three studies carried out in Italy from 2010 to 2013, showed that controlling for ideological orientation, moral foundation endorsement is associated with voting intention. In Study 1...

This essay turns to ancient sources in order to rethink the relationship between political apathy and democracy. If modern democratic theorists place political apathy entirely outside of democracy – either as a destructive limit upon the full realization of a democratic polity, or, more sanguinely, as a pragmatic necessity which tempers democracy so that it may function in a workable yet watere...

Popular elections are the central political act of democracies, and citizens in all advanced democracies organize their political competition through parties that compete in general elections. While political historians have studied parties for many years, it is remarkable that only in the last decade or so have there been serious attempts at abstract conceptualizations—that is, formal models—o...

This paper argues that theorizing computer-mediated communications as political engagement within a sociomaterial perspective, an understanding attentive to the mutual constitution of the social and material, allows researchers to conceptually analyze the unique political practices afforded by information and communication technologies and their function within a public sphere. This approach fo...

A model of the opinion dynamics underlying the political decision is proposed. The analysis is restricted to a bipolar scheme with a possible third political area. The interaction among voters is local but the final decision strongly depends on global effects such as, for example, the rating of the governments. As in the realistic case, the individual decision making process is determined by th...

Political power and its exertion by the various agencies of politics (i.e. politicians, civil servants, political institutions) can be described as a kind of symbolic action (cf. Edelmann 1964, 1971). Social and political reality, its perception or constitution by the participants of politics (politicians and citizens), is shaped and determined by communication and its means. That is, it is sha...

The theory of opportunistic political business cycles predicts incumbent politicians will alter their economic policies to spur short-run growth to attract additional votes for the upcoming election. There has not been much emphasis on the possibility of historical political business cycles prior to the Keynesian Revolution. No study has yet undertaken a systematic approach to testing for polic...