Somewhere over the rainbow: Italy and the regulation of same-sex unions

While almost all European democracies from the 1980s started to accord legal recognition to same-sex couples, Italy was, in 2016, the last West European country to adopt a regulation, after a tortuous path. Why was Italy such a latecomer? What kind of barriers were encountered by the legislative process? What were the factors behind the policy change? To answer these questions, this article first discusses current morality policymaking, paying specific attention to the literature dealing with same-sex partnerships. Second, it provides a reconstruction of the Italian policy trajectory, from the entrance of the issue into political debate until the enactment of the civil union law, by considering both partisan and societal actors for and against the legislative initiative. The article argues that the Italian progress towards the regulation of same-sex unions depended on the balance of power between change and blocking coalitions and their degree of congruence during the policymaking process. In 2016 the government formed a broad consensus and the parliament passed a law on civil unions. However, the new law represented only a small departure from the status quo due to the low congruence between actors within the change coalition.

Measuring Culture Effect size Differences in Slovenian and Portuguese Leadership Practices: Cross-Cultural Leadership Universality or Contigency?

This paper measures the cultural effect size across five types of leadership practices by using the Leadership Practice Inventory (LPI) instrument and drawing on the GLOBE research project framework. It tests cultural universality vs. contingency in five LPI leadership practices in an East-West EU comparison, both with an ex-socialist past. It employs four different effect size statistics. The paper contributes to the narrowing of the empirical gap in researching leadership practices in a small, East-West European country context. Only two of the five leadership practices show statistically significant effect sizes. Furthermore, the leadership practice Encouraging the heart is the only one to display a relatively moderate effect size. Thus, the evidence seems to support the universalist perspective over the contingency perspective.

Living Next Door to Germany: Denmark and the German Problem

This article analyses Danish relations with the two German states. After 1949 Denmark found itself in a special position as the only West European country that was neighbour to both Germanys, having a land border with the Federal Republic and a sea border and important communications links with the German Democratic Republic. But Denmark recognised only the Federal Republic as the legitimate representative of Germany. Germany had historically constituted a serious problem for Denmark, and even in the after-war period Danish relations with its big neighbour were beset with problems. After 1955, when the minority question was settled and Denmark and the FRG were both members of NATO, relations with West Germany improved. Relations with the GDR were much more troubled because Denmark was to an extent forced to bow to West German interests, but could not ignore the existence of the East German neighbour state.

The Political Power of Farmers: An English Perspective

England has one of the longest histories of industrialisation and urbanisation of any West European country. This has inevitably had a formative influence in the structuring of its social science research. For political scientists it has involved an almost overwhelming concern with urban political systems and industrial cleavages. An analysis of class based voting has been a major focal point with its implicit assumption that any other cleavages based, for example, on religious or regional identities are marginal or atavistic. Certainly there has been little acknowledgement of any significant urban–rural divide. In consequence the study of rural politics has been something of an intellectual backwater and there has been no attempt to define or identify rural politics as an object of study. The blinkered vision of political scientists is disappointing. It unduly ignores a number of studies that have engaged with mainstream debates and frequently made worthwhile contributions, most notably, with reference to the case of agriculture, in the understanding of relations between government and industry (Cox et al, 1986; Grant, 1983). There are also signs that some political scientists are beginning to reject models of national (i.e. urban) voting behaviour and political systems in favour of more spatially sensitive work in which greater prominence is given to regional and local differences (Dunleavy, 1990; Johnston, 1985, 1987; Johnston et al, 1988).

De Taalsituatie van kinderen uit Suriname

The Netherlands have become one of the most varied multi-racial societies of Europe after the last war. Any West European country which had or still has colonies, now has the important task of facing multi-racial changes and coming to grips with them. There are, of course, language problems, e.g. the fact that our teachers have not been trained in socio-linguistics. Therefore they have no knowledge of the language situation of the migrated child. They rarely succeed in teaching these children to master the language so as to be able to communicate in the language as adequately as they do in a mother tongue situation. If a teacher wants to help Surinam children become completely bilingual he will have to realise that the elementary mechanisms of his own language differ from those of Surinam, Hindi, Chinese, Moroccan or any other language in the world. Hence, language education of Surinam children is much more than just teaching things like vocabulary and sentence structure. It is, there-fore, to be expected that children from Surinam will not be motivated to learn Dutch as well as they know their own mother tongue, as long as the pluriformity of society is not taken into account in their education, in study books, magazines, television and the press. Most children in Surinam live in an environment where more than one language is spoken, sometimes including Dutch. This situation continues in the Netherlands, although there are differences in the received pronunciation of Dutch: the Dutch which a Surinam child uses differs markedly from the Dutch spoken by teachers, school children, in fact, the vast majority of the new society. It is clear that the children of Surinam migrants get into difficulties compared with native Dutch children in our system of education. These difficulties already begin when the children fail to understand what the teacher is trying to tell them. The school education of the Surinam child is such, that he does not readily ask the teacher for an explanation when there is something he does not understand. Many things, therefor , remain unnoticed, because the teacher does not realise that the child is unfamiliar with even simple concepts. Besides, the children make mistakes because they have learned to think and talk in their own language. The stimulation of the acquisition of Dutch requires: 1. countering interference which occurs because two or more languages (Sranan Tongo, Hindi, Dutch) are used together; 2. forcing back institutionalised deviations of Dutch received pronunciation. In the framework of establishing one's identity all this must never lead to an underestimation of the native language. From research work by Alers and Voskuil it appears, that especially the influence of Sranan Tongo on the Dutch of Surinam children is very great. Three categories of "typical mistakes" may be pointed out: 1.the connection between spoken language and written language, 2. difficulties of a syntactical nature, 3. difficulties of a morphological nature.