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After the 2018 general election, several scholars remarked on the failure of the 5 Star Movement (5SM) to increase its vote in Milan. While the role of demographic and socioeconomic factors has been highlighted, little attention has been devoted to spatial dynamics. The authors analyze the greater city of Milan using a new set of spatial units that capture the characteristics of the local populations which voted at specific polling stations. They regress support for the 5SM in each electoral district on a range of demographic, socioeconomic and spatial variables. The results show that more disadvantaged districts just outside the municipality have a strong propensity to support the 5SM. Many of the individuals and families living in these areas were negatively affected by economic crisis and continue to experience strain. These are not places of extreme marginality but have unsatisfied needs that are largely ignored by the traditional parties.

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the development of the UK and Italian university research funding systems with a special focus on Peer Review-Based Research Assessment (PRBRA) and its cost. Much of the debate surrounding the value of performance-based allocation systems hinges on the disadvantages versus the benefits of their implementation, and there is very little evidence on either their absolute cost or their cost relative to other allocation systems. Our objective is to fill this gap, collating the best possible estimates of the costs of alternative research funding methods to inform the ongoing policy debate. First, we compare funding in the UK and Italy during the period 2005–2012 and analyze the development of performance-based allocation in the two systems. Second, based on public reports and documents collected from universities, we discuss the public agency and university costs of RAE2008 and REF2014 and provide some estimates for VQR2012. We find that RAE2008 costs accounted for less than 1% of the total performance allocation in the related period while the VQR2012 efficiency ratio is estimated at around 2.5%. Finally, we compare the costs and efficiency ratios of PRBRA with metrics-based assessment and Research Council allocations and show that costs increase going from metrics to PRBRA to Research Council allocation.