Italy

Evidence gone missing in the Italian election campaign show

Paul Krugman has written in his End This Depression Now! ‘In normal times, the latest academic research plays a very small role in real-world policy debates, which is arguably how it should be – in the heat of the political moment, how many policy makers are truly equipped to evaluate the quality of a professor’s

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The solitude of an academic in the world of Italian politics

Prof. Mario Monti was nominated senator for life in late 2011 by the Italian president Giorgio Napolitano. This move allowed our president to assign to Prof. Monti the task to establish a new government after the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi at the time when Italy was on the brink of default (October 2011). Prof. Monti’s

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Six years of jail to scientists for L\’Aquila earthquake. Trial against science?

Six Italian scientists have been found guilty for having given insufficient warning to residents of L’Aquila about the seismic risks they faced ahead of earthquake that hit the city in the night of 6 of April 2009.  The earthquake had a magnitude of 6.3 and caused 309 deaths, more than 1.500 injured and more than

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Italian politics, ‘il muro di gomma’, and the challenge for research-evidence to influence policy

Clay and Schaeffer’s book Room for Manoeuvre describes the policy and policy making as ‘as a chaos of purposes and accidents’.  During the workshop facilitated by RAPID we often describe policy making as complex, multifactorial and non linear. The complexity of policy processes described in these two definition has two consequences for the influencing potential

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