Italy says no: the 2016 constitutional referendum and its consequences

On 4 December 2016, Italians went to the polls to say yes or no in a popular referendum called by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on his package of constitutional reforms. Turnout was very high: 65.5 per cent. The No vote scored an impressive victory: 59.1 per cent rejected those reforms; 40.9 per cent supported them. This article puts those reforms in the context of previous attempts to modify several articles of the Italian constitution. The authors analyze and criticize the substance of those reforms and explain their possible impact on the functioning of the Italian political system. The Yes and No alignments were somewhat diversified, while the Yes vote got a lot of support from an often curious combination of domestic and foreign bedfellows interested in the political stability of Renzi’s government more than in any specific reform. Renzi’s defeat led to his resignation. A new government was immediately formed. It is unclear when and whether other, different constitutional reforms will be formulated. The Italian political and institutional transition continues while once again attention is focused on the electoral law and on how to restructure the parties and the party system.     

Paros,Report II: The 1973 Campaign

Abstract

Paros is one of the most important islands of the Aegean sea, known best because of its white translucent marble. The island developed a very important school of sculpture from the Archaic to Roman times. An investigation of the island started in 1969, with the support of the Greek Archaeological Service, is centered on the ancient capital of Paros, which survives in the ruins of its ancient walls and an Archaic Ionic temple, and in the northern part of the island, where recent surveys and excavations have brought to light a significant number of sites, some of which go back to the Bronze and the Dark Ages of Greece.     

The Dynamics and Volatility of Commercial and Residential Property Prices: Theory and Evidence*

Abstract. This article investigates the dynamics of property prices and their interaction with output growth in a general equilibrium model. Closed form solutions and testable hypotheses are derived from a mildly restricted version of the model. The testable hypotheses are broadly supported empirically. In particular, (1) the volatility of commercial property prices is higher than that of residential property prices, (2) each of the lagged, contemporary, and forward commercial property prices is positively correlated with residential property prices, (3) the contemporaneous covariance between the two property prices is larger than the lagged covariance, and (4) output growth is positively correlated with both property prices. These results are consistent with simulations results that are based on a more general specification of the model.     

The Labour government and the battle for public opinion in the 1975 referendum on the European Community

An upsurge of historical research in this century has assessed various campaigns that promoted European Community (EC) membership to the British people. This article, concentrating on the Labour government’s approach to the 1975 referendum on the EC, uses sources such as official records at The National Archives and political papers of some of the key agents; these sources have hitherto been underused for investigating public opinion-related activities on Europe in 1975. Although acknowledging that the interpretation of a government-controlled referendum applies up to a point, the article emphasises, as its key theme, the government’s difficulties in controlling events during the campaign itself. Despite having much support from newspapers, the government often had difficult relations with the mass media as a whole, and the article challenges the belief that it was effective here. This article also contests the idea that the campaign made much impression on the public. These findings further apply to other campaigns on the EC in the 1960s and 1970s and potentially in contemporary British politics.     

The magdalenian in Western Central Europe: Settlement pattern and regionality

Magdalenian material from northern Switzerland, southwestern and southeastern Germany, the middle Rhine, and central Germany is examined for differences among these geographical areas. Several regional features, including a broad range of archaeological data, can be identified and indicate two regional groupings, a southwestern and a northeastern. The first includes sites from central Germany and the middle Rhine, while the second includes northern Switzerland and southwestern Germany. The southeastern German sites cannot be firmly placed within this pattern because of the insecure data base. The main differences are in prey species, hunting and settlement patterns, and some characteristics of the mobile art. The comparison does not allow a finer separation, although the two regional groups could probably be subdivided into smaller geographical units. Alternative explanations are discussed and further avenues of research are proposed.     

On the Evolution of Relative Prices and Its Nature at the Regional Level: The Case of Spain

This paper studies the relevance and nature of shifts in relative prices at the regional level in Spain. Deviations in relative prices tend to be small (at most half a point of inflation annually) but persistent. They are determined by features intrinsic to deep economic integration, in particular, wage mechanisms operating at the national level. This is in stark contrast to evidence at the international level. Therefore, while acknowledging that divergent price evolutions are possible in the European Monetary Union, their nature will be different from those observed among Spanish regions.     

Carter's foreign policy: The perception of failure

Harold Brown, Thinking about National Security: Defence and Foreign Policy in a Dangerous World. (Westview Press, Boulder, 1982.)

Seyom Brown, The Faces of Power Constancy and Change in United States Foreign Policy from Truman to Reagan. (Columbia University Press, New York, 1983.)

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser 1977–1981. (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 1983.)

Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President. (Bantam Books, New York, 1982.)

Cyrus Vance, Hard Choices: Critical Years in America's Foreign Policy. (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983.)     

The commentariat and discourse failure: language and atrocity in Cool Britannia

Recent terrorist events in the UK, such as the security alerts at British airports in August 2006 and the London bombings of July 2005 gained extensive media and academic analysis. This study contends, however, that much of the commentary demonstrated a wide degree of failure among government agencies, academic and analytic experts and the wider media, about the nature of the threat and continues to distort comprehension of the extant danger. The principal failure, this argument maintains, was, and continues to be, one of an asymmetry of comprehension that mistakes the still relatively limited means of violent jihadist radicals with limited political ends. The misapprehension often stems from the language that surrounds the idea of 'terrorism', which increasingly restricts debate to an intellectually redundant search for the 'root causes' that give rise to the politics of com placency. In recent times this outlook has consistently underestimated the level of the threat to the security of the UK. This article argues that a more realistic appreciation of the current security condition requires abandoning the prevailing view that the domestic threat is best prosecuted as a criminal conspiracy. It demands instead a total strategy to deal with a totalizing threat. The empirical evidence demonstrates the existence of a physical threat, not merely the political fear of threat. The implementation of a coherent set of social policies for confronting the threat at home recognizes that securing state borders and maintaining internal stability are the fi rst tasks of government. Fundamentally, this requires a return to an understanding of the Hobbesian conditions for sovereignty, which, despite the delusions of post-Cold War cosmopolitan multiculturalism, never went away.