Poliarchie / Polyarchies volume 3 n. 2/2020

Epidemic/pandemic narratives are social and cultural processes and therefore are instrumental in shaping and justifying pathways of responses at institutional level, and also in understanding people’s responses and behaviours during disease outbreaks. However, attention is very rarely given to the narratives of young people who, during the COVID-19 pandemic have been implicated from the start. The paper examines the pandemic narratives of a group of students of a Vocational Training Centre in Triest during the first lock-down (March-May 2020). The findings indicate how the students re-worked the official narratives, creating a multi-layered interpretation of the pandemic which made them revaluate many things that were previously taken for granted. The research also highlights the need of a clearer and more coherent communication from the media and the government, to avoid dangerous behaviours that could invalidate the preventive measures taken to limit the spread of the virus.

In the 1970s the neocorporatist theory of interest representation was presented as an alternative to plural-ism in a historical phase where several factors of political crisis were particularly considerable. In the following decades, this vision of policy-making went through different vicissitudes, but nevertheless remained in political debates due to the experiences of those political systems where it was applied more or less regularly. In the framework of the current health and economic emergency caused by the spread of the Sars-Cov-2 virus, in several European and extra-European countries governments and economic interest organisations joined forces for the design and implementation of emergency policy initiatives. This paper considers the application of the tripartite approach in the EU countries, according to the currently available data (end of October 2020). Apparently, the neocorporatist approach proved useful since there was a remarkable resort to concertation. On the other side, the persisting emergency and the uncertain social and economic prospects only lead to momentarily partial conclusions.

Through the approaches to the analysis of the decision making process developed by H.D. Lasswell and H. Simon, the paper aims at demonstrating how the means and ends of decisions can hardly be distinguished. In the staged sequence of a decision, the same activity can be classified simultaneously as an end or as a means. This “discovery” has a clear value in the analysis of decision-making processes, particularly when technical committees or “technocracies” are operating, as in the case of the management of the emergency for the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy. The technical committee that supported the Italian government took decisions that were not merely instrumental but “finalized”, therefore as such they were of political value and they were political decisions.

Political-institutional responses to the first wave of Covid-19 were more effective in Italy than in other parts of the world. Not so, at least in part, during the second wave. Precisely for this reason, it is urgent to have a greater awareness of the reasons for the success of the collective action to deal with Covid-19 in the first six months of 2020. The essay aims to analyze the “governance” of the first wave, observing four different circuits that had government action as their center: the government-regions circuit; the government-organized interests circuit: the government-experts circuit; the government-media circuit. Given the exceptional nature of the moment, it was not possible to activate the normal parliamentary debate, where, especially in the work of the committees, both territorial and sectoral interests are represented. However, when parliament is inhibited from acting, someone has to assume the responsibility of the decisions, otherwise the latter would be taken without adequate deliberative scrutiny. Cooperative federalism and neo-corporatism seem to have been the two new patterns of decision-making that emerged from this suspension of the parliamentary life. These patterns, which allowed the government action to succeed in the first wave of Covid-19, could nevertheless constitute a possible solution to the evils of our centralism and regionalism.

This article examines the process of derogation of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). It focuses on the COVID-19 emergency situation and on the limits posed to fundamental human rights and freedoms by the measures implemented in response to the sanitary crisis in Europe. It is argued that derogation is acceptable if under the close supervision of Council of Europe bodies (CoE). Moreover, any emergency measures which determine the derogation or limitation of human rights and fundamental freedoms should be reasonable and limited in scope and time, and thus should have an exceptional and temporary nature and should be constantly tested against the principles of necessity and proportionality.

The health crisis generated by the pandemic spread of the Covid-19 virus in spring 2020 had an impact not only on people’s values and lifestyles, economic growth and social reorganization, but also on international relations among states: the European Union appeared weak and fragmented; the US attacked China for having kept silent about the risk of contagion and accused it of producing the virus in a laboratory; developing countries were abandoned in a situation of serious shortage of health facilities and the World Health Organization has shown that it did not have the decision-making and financial instruments to act. In this context and in the midst of a health emergency, the author administered an online questionnaire from which he extrapolated, for this contribution, only the answers of the youth sub-sample. These were submitted to an analysis of the principal components and the results related to some socio-attitudinal variables: sex and political orientation. The data reveal, on the one hand, within the European Union, the perception of the spread of Euro-scepticism and populism and the increase of isolation and competitiveness among the states, to be responded to with new goals and mechanisms for the functioning of the Union; on the other hand, the need for post-emergency management in solidarity with developing countries, with greater investment in research and health systems and greater recognition of the WHO.

What are the motivations, ideas, and expectations of young people regarding the future during the Covid-19 pandemic? This was the central question in the survey we conducted, and which led to various findings. There were those who paint the future in an apocalyptic way, others who see a world of hope, of social and economic reconstruction that will put solidarity, the environment and work at the center. A moral dimension also emerged from the responses of the interviewees, social responsibility towards human values, respect for others, and above all the desire to participate in political choices. The answers also show a good degree of awareness of the current political difficulties and of the current condition of youth in Italy.

Poliarchie/Polyarchies is multi-disciplinary journal which aims at promoting the encounter of the social sciences and humanities, ranging from sociology and political science to history, economics, law and philosophy. The analysis of political and social change can indeed be investigated from different perspectives and with the help of a variety of methodological tools. Poliarche/Polyarchies embraces a range of contemporary issues: processes of supranational integration and democratization in the world; the transformation of contemporary societies under the pressure of immigration and environmental challenges; the crises of “electoral democracy” in Europe and the development of a deliberative model of democracy; the potential “clash of civilizations” and socio-religious conflict; the resurgence of nationalisms and micro-regionalism in Europe and in the world; the integration of policy processes into networks and of communities into new frameworks and governance systems. The journal has an anonymous referee system and two issues per year are expected.

The effects of the spread of Covid-19 have had important consequences on everybody’s life but also had a dramatic impact for the population inside correctional centers in Italy; these issuses have finally received great attention over the last few months. This paper is primarily focused on the analysis of the critical aspects of overcrowding in Italian correctional centers, a cyclical issue which has become even more critical during the current pandemic emergency. Our research aims at describing the development of the number of prisoners before and after government legislative actions taken in early 2020 to reduce overcrowding of prisoners; furthermore we study these effects in combination with the main features of some Italian correctional centers. There is some evidence that the number of prisoners first decreased but then started increasing again, as it had always happened after similar governative decrees adopted in other cases in the past; moreover, it is also clear that the available capacity of jails is not homogeneous in Italy and that the situation is different between the different regions. The main difficulty encountered in preparing the research analysis for this contribution has been the access to data related to the dissemination of the pandemic inside correctional centers; in fact, in some frameworks such as prisons, this kind of information is not often available or completely updated.

The historical period determined by the health emergency has highlighted the question relating to the emergency laws, and even more the increasingly incisive and pervasive role of non normative acts. As a consequence, a tension between authority and freedom arises. It is now necessary to question the fundamental dimensions and tendencies of that tension.