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We model voters’ gender bias as a prejudice on women's competence coming from a distorted prior. We analyse the effect of this bias in a two-period two-party election model in which voters care about both policy preference and competence. We find that, if voters (wrongly) believe that women are drawn from a distribution of competences with higher weights on lower values, female politicians are less likely to win office but, when elected, they are on average more competent than male elected officials. As a consequence, female incumbents seek re-election more often.

In this paper we analyse the effect of constitutional structures over policy outcomes. In particular, we exploit the heterogeneity in parliamentary systems deriving from the presence and the use of the confidence vote to investigate whether stable and unstable parliamentary systems behave differently in terms of the policies they implement. This finer partition of parliamentary systems allows us to identify effects that are more robust than the ones previously discussed in the literature. We show that the difference between presidential and parliamentary systems documented in previous works is driven by a difference between presidential and stable parliamentary systems. We suggest that possible transmission channels are legislative cohesion and (the absence of) selection.

We introduce a model with strategic voting in a parliamentary election with proportional representation and uncertainty about voters’ preferences. In any equilibrium of the model, most voters only vote for those parties whose positions are extreme. In the resulting parliament, a consensus government forms and the policy maximizing the sum of utilities of the members of the government is implemented

This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, an incumbent and a possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed about the state of the world. Due to the asymmetries in government responsibility between candidates, the incumbent's statement may convey information on the relevance of the issues to voters. In equilibrium, the incumbent sometimes strategically releases his statement early and thus signals the importance of his signature issue to the voters. We find that, since the incumbent's positioning on the issue reveals private information which the challenger can use in later statements, the incumbent's incentives to distort the campaign are decreasing in his quality, as previously documented by the empirical literature. The distortions arising in equilibrium are decreasing in the incumbent's true competence; however, the distortions may be increasing in the incumbent's expected competence on his signature issue.

Lo scopo del presente lavoro di ricerca storica è di esaminare il contributo allo sviluppo della professione infermieristica delle congregazioni religiose del XIX secolo prendendo come esempio le Suore di Maria Bambina conosciute anche come Suore della Carità delle Sante Bartolomea Capitanio e Vincenza Gerosa. Sono state analizzate 63 fonti bibliografiche reperite nell'archivio storico Casa Madre delle Suore di Maria Bambina a Milano in via S. Sofia n. 13, ad esclusione di una fonte reperita presso la Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense di Milano. Il lavoro di ricerca ha posto una lente d'ingrandimento sul contributo che le Suore di Maria Bambina hanno fornito, rispetto alle aree professionali e allo sviluppo degli attributi distintivi della professione infermieristica nell'ottica sociologica (Greenwood, 1980). Per l'analisi delle fonti documentarie è stato applicato il metodo di ricerca storica secondo Chabod (2006). Per l'esegesi delle fonti si è creata una griglia di analisi della fonte documentaria. Dall'aggregazione dei dati sono emersi due filoni d'indagine: il primo riguarda il ruolo di Suor Emilia Vinante come esperta per la professione infermieristica e il secondo per quanto attiene alla politica professionale promossa dalla Federazione Italiana Religiose Ospedaliere (FIRO). Alla luce dei risultati della ricerca si può affermare che le congregazioni religiose hanno operato nell'ambito della professione infermieristica diventando una forza sociale in grado di incidere in modo determinante sullo sviluppo culturale e professionale degli infermieri, The purpose of this historical research project is to examine the contribution of 19th-century religious congregations in the development of the nursing profession, based on the historical example of the Sisters of Charity of Sts. Bartolomea Capitanio and Vincenza Gerosa (or the Sisters of the Holy Child Mary). To this end, sixty three volumes were analysed, all taken from the historical archive of the Generalate of the Sisters of the Holy Child Mary in Milan, in via S. Sofia n.13, with the exception of just one, taken from the Braidense National Library, also in Milan. This research project has highlighted the sociological contribution provided by the Sisters of the Holy Child Mary to the professional nature of nursing, and to the development of the distinctive features of the nursing profession (Greenwood, 1980). All documentary sources were analysed in line with the Chabod historical research method (2006), and for their critical interpretation, a scheme of analysis was created. Two lines of investigation emerged from the data collected: the role of Sister Emilia Vinante as an expert with regard to the nursing profession, and the professional strategies promoted by FIRO (Federation of Italian Religious Nurses). Based on the conclusions of the research project, it may be stated that religious congregations contributed greatly to the nursing profession, leaving a decisive mark on the cultural and professional development of nurses.

Constitutional structures shape politicians’ behaviour and hence policy outcomes through the different incentives schemes that they generate. In this paper we analyse these mechanisms in parliamentary and presidential systems. The comparison is carried out by analysing how the two systems may select the efficient policy in the presence of asymmetric information. Presidential and parliamentary systems differ in that the policy proposed by the executive in the parliamentary system is confidence-dependent and observable. The main findings suggest that the parliament responds better to the incentive scheme in the presidential system due to the lower uncertainty faced by legislators over their term limit. However, the parliamentary system generates a more efficient behaviour of the executive due to selection and disciplining effects.

Motivated by the need to understand voting behaviour under different electoral rules, Laslier et al. (Eur Union Polit, 16(4):601–615, 2015) have conducted an online experiment, the EuroVotePlus experiment, focusing on the effects of the different rules adopted to elect members of the European parliament on voters’ behaviour. The experiment took place in several European countries in the 3 weeks before the 2014 elections for the European Parliament. This paper focuses on the Italian data. Firstly, we show that the behaviour of Italian respondents is consistent with the empirical findings at the European level. Then, we exploit the change from open list to closed list elections implemented in Italy in 1993 to investigate whether and how preferences over institutions are affected by experience. We find that respondents who voted using the open list system in Italy are more likely to prefer closed list systems, and that the effect is stronger the higher the number of open list elections the respondents have faced

This paper studies the effects of social comparison on risk taking behavior. In our framework, decision makers evaluate the consequences of their choices as changes with respect to both their own and their peers’ conditions. We test experimentally whether different positions in the social ranking determine different risk attitudes. Subjects interact in a simulated workplace environment, where they receive possibly different wages as compensation for effort and then undertake a risky decision that may give them an extra gain. We find that social comparison matters for risk attitudes. In addition, risk aversion decreases with the size of social gains. As a consequence, subjects are less risk averse in social loss than in small social gain, whereas their risk attitudes do not differ between social loss and large social gain

In this paper we refine the interpretation of the European two-dimensional political space and the investigation of its determinants compared to the approach commonly adopted in the spatial voting literature. Specifically, we take into account heterogeneity and cross-correlation among legislators by explicitly including into the model a spatial effect which, in turn, relies on new sets of linguistic, geographical, institutional and cultural metrics. We confirm that the first dimension of the European political space is mainly explained by the Members of European Parliament’s ideological position on a left-right scale. We also find that correlation across legislators plays a significant role in explaining the first dimension when their pairwise distance is defined according to an individual- ism index, which turns out to be closely related to left-right ideology positioning. Even more interestingly, we show that “space” intended in a broad economic sense plays an important role in interpreting the second dimension of the political spectrum. The most relevant metric that induces spatial effects along the second dimension is based on an institutional index. Moreover, we also find that the second dimension is influenced by the gender composition of the political parties

Lo scopo del presente lavoro di ricerca storica è esaminare il contributo di Cristina Trivulzio Principessa di Belgiojoso allo sviluppo dell’organizzazione e dell’assistenza infermieristica in Italia, specialmente durante la Repubblica Romana del 1849 durante la quale fu una delle respon- sabili del servizio di ambulanze e del soccorso ai feriti. Sono state analizzate 19 fonti bibliogra- fiche delle 129 reperite in cinque archivi storici italiani. Per l’analisi delle fonti documentarie è stato applicato il metodo di ricerca storica secondo Chabod (1999). Per l’interpretazione dei documenti è stata creata una griglia di analisi. Dai dati raccolti sono emersi cinque argomenti sui quali Cristina Trivulzio si espresse in modo ricorrente: l’organizzazione, la politica sanitaria, la formazione, la ricerca e l’assistenza infermieristica. Grazie ai risultati di questa ricerca si è dimostrata la natura del contributo che Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso diede all’Assistenza Infermieristica, tanto da poterla annoverare tra le fondatrici dell’assistenza infermieristica italiana., The aim of this historical research project is to examine the contribution of Cristina Trivulzio Princess of Belgiojoso to the development of the nursing organisation in Italy. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the period of the Roman Republic, as in 1849 Cristina Trivulzio (Princess of Belgiojoso) was one of the person in charge of the service of caring and rescuing of the injured. For this reason, nineteen volumes were analysed out of the one hundred twenty-nine volumes found in five Italian historical archives. All documentary sources were evaluated accordingly to the Chabod historical research method (1999), while for their critical interpretation a scheme of analysis was created. As a result, five topics clearly emerged from the data collected: organisation, health politics, training, research and nursing. To sum up, this research reveals that the contributions of Cristina Trivulzio are so relevant that she may be counted among the founders of the italian nursing organisation.

In the theory of psychological games it is assumed that players' preferences on material consequences depend on endogenous beliefs. Most of the applications of this theoretical framework assume that the psychological utility functions representing such preferences are common knowledge. However, this is often unrealistic. In particular, it cannot be true in experimental games where players are subjects drawn at random from a population. Therefore, an incomplete-information methodology is needed. We take a first step in this direction, focusing on guilt aversion in the Trust Game. In our models, agents have heterogeneous belief hierarchies. We characterize equilibria where trust occurs with positive probability. Our analysis illustrates the incomplete-information approach to psychological games and can help to organize experimental results in the Trust Game.

The effect of constitutional structures (such as the effect of a presidential vs. a parliamentary system) over policy outcomes has been widely studied in the economic literature. In this paper, we investigate whether stable parliamentary systems and unstable parliamentary systems behave differently in terms of the policy outcomes they implement. We show that accounting for the stability of parliamentary systems generates results that are more robust compared to the previous literature. More precisely, we find that stable parliamentary systems are significantly different both from presidential and from unstable parliamentary ones. Moreover, we show that this result is robust to changes in the set of countries, and to changes in the definition of stability. Finally, we discuss how these results are consistent with the presence of a selection effect in parliamentary systems

Analisi dei significati culturali degli Alzheimer cafè