Under the leadership of Matteo Salvini the Lega Nord has shifted away from its previous political identity as a voice for Italy's North and has placed hostility to the policies and institutions of the European Union (EU) at the heart of its rhetoric. Nowadays, the enemy is Rome no longer: it is Brussels, European institutions, and the threat to the national sovereignty posed by the EU. Borrowing from the Italian political philosopher Nicola Matteucci, we would describe Salvini's Lega as a 'populist insurgency'. That it is to say, it is a populist party that marries the traditional populist evocation of the virtues of the people against the corrupt elites, with a pervasive glibness of analysis.Sotto la guida di Matteo Salvini, la Lega Nord si è allontanata dalla sua precedente identità politica per cui dava voce alle proteste del Nord Italia per porre l'ostilità alle politiche e alle istituzioni dell'Unione Europea (UE) al centro della sua retorica. Oggi il nemico non è più a Roma: è Bruxelles, le istituzioni europee, e la minaccia alla sovranità nazionale posta dall'UE. Adottando la prospettiva concettuale del filosofo politico italiano Nicola Matteucci, descriveremo la Lega di Salvini come una "rivolta populista", ovvero come un partito che sposa la tradizionale evocazione populista delle virtù del popolo contro le élite corrotte con una pervasiva superficialità di analisi.

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Simulations can be extremely successful in acquainting participants with a negotiation's logic and process, especially in those political systems in which negotiations are prominent, such as the European Union (EU). After a brief introduction on the simulations in teaching the European integration, in this article we present, step-by-step, a simulation game on the adoption of a real piece of European legislation: the regulation that implemented the European Citizens' Initiative, one of the main innovations of the Lisbon Treaty. Special attention is devoted to the different phases of a simulation design, from the choice of the topic, the choice and allocation of roles, the preparation of all the necessary documentation, to the debriefing and assessment phases. The article originates from a 4-year long study with undergraduate students from two Italian universities.

This article discusses Italy and its efforts to strengthen democracy in a nation marked with bargained pluralism. Italy was founded in 1860. From its inception, it has been informed by the Napoleonic tradition of centre-periphery relations. With the Napoleonic tradition as a framework, Italy has had a strong and technocratic central apparatus which controlled the territory through its deconcentrated offices placed at the provincial level, with self-government circumscribed to the municipal level. The municipalities were both the traditional locus of self-government and the terminals of the central government, on whose behalf they carried out a number of security and public health tasks. In the elite states of Italy, the Napoleonic tradition was adopted because it was already familiar to them. The remaining municipalities adhered to the German type because of the contention that it would aid in curbing the centripetal forces that were still at work underneath the surface of the unitary rhetoric. In the 1980s, a debate was introduced in Italy on the need for institutional reforms that would lead to the stability and effectiveness of the local governments. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Italian political class officially embraced the need to reform the subnational level of government to permit the creation of an authentic system of political preference formation. In this article, the electoral and territorial reforms, which formed part of the single reformist effort to modernize Italian democracy, are discussed. Included as well are the reforms made in centre-periphery relations to achieve long-coveted political goals.