In the current economic crisis, social movements are simultaneously facing two types of challenges: first, they are confronting institutions which are less able (or willing) to mediate new demands for social justice and equity emerging from various sectors of society, and second, given the highly individualised structure of contemporary society, they are also experiencing difficulties in building bonds of solidarity and cooperation among people, bonds which are a fundamental resource for collective action. It is in this context that protests waves, which may be very relevant, are in fact often short-lived, and it is in this context that we detect the rise and consolidation of new mutualistic and cooperative experiences within which (similarly to the past) new ties and frames for collective action are created. This article discusses and analyses social movement organisations which focus on both the intensification of economic problems and the difficulties of rebuilding social bonds and solidarity within society, emphasising solidarity and the use of ‘alternative’ forms of consumption as means to re-embed the economic system within social relations, starting from the local level. While discussing what is new and/or what has been renewed in new Sustainable Community Movement Organisations, the article will develop an analytical framework which will combine social movements and political consumerism theories by focusing on two basic dimensions: consumer culture and identity and organisational resources and repertoire of action.

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Over the past years, parties often described as populist, such as SYRIZA in Greece, the Five Star Movement (FSM) in Italy and Podemos in Spain have made significant electoral breakthroughs, unsettling well-established party systems. In the literature, inclusionary populism has primarily been applied to Latin America whereas the three Southern European parties have been examined individually, but not in comparative perspective. The purpose of this article is to provide a comparative analysis, based on an original electoral manifestos content analysis, aimed at unveiling the ‘inclusionary populism’ features of the ‘new’ political parties that have emerged in Southern Europe. By focusing on the 2012–16 period, the article shows that the inclusionary category can be fruitfully applied also to European political parties; it finds different degrees of inclusionary populism (namely between SYRIZA and Podemos); and it proves that the FSM falls between the two exclusionary vs. inclusionary poles.

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Academic attention to populism has sharply increased in recent years. Yet, a commonly accepted definition is still lacking, with scholars disagreeing on categorization, labels, and boundaries between its different manifestations. In this article, through an analysis of Euromanifestos and party statutes, we address the interactions between Italian political parties and populism by adopting the various definitions available in populism theory, that is, populism as (i) ideology, (ii) rhetoric, (iii) communication style, and (iv) organization. Our aim is to identify all major attributes linked to populism and empirically investigate them with lower level indicators, measuring and comparing them across Italian parties and over time. The empirical analysis, conducted through a formalized content analysis of the European electoral programmes and party statutes, considers populism not as a discrete concept but rather as a continuous one and therefore enables us to undercover the variety of populisms within the Italian parties. The main finding of the article is that over the last decades all Italian parties have shown some signs of populism and that the intensification of populist features is strongly linked to the exarcebation of the financial and economic crisis, and its governance.

Political consumerism has become one of the most promising research fields in social movement and political participation studies. However, most research has focused mainly on the more personalized and less collective version of such forms of action, leaving largely unexplored the nature and dynamic of some new local grassroots organizations (such as the so-called Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale, or Solidarity Purchasing Groups [SPGs] in Italy). The influence of such forms of political participation in contemporary democracies has been scarcely investigated. The aim of this article is to provide an in-depth exploratory case study of SPGs in Italy, which more specifically focuses on the main definitional, organizational, and sociodemographic features of SPG participation. The article shows that the Italian SPGs are locally based hybrid pressure movements that go beyond conventional forms of political consumerism by adopting innovative organizational and participatory tools.

The article deals with the differential domestic employment policy adaptation to the European Employment Strategy that occurred over the past years in two European countries-Italy and France. Building on the Europeanization and welfare state change literature, the contribution operationalizes the "goodness of fit" hypothesis and develops a "policy structure" approach for the analysis of domestic employment policy change. The main argument is that domestic adaptation to the European Union depends primarily on the preferences of key institutional and social actors, and not on the specific design of domestic institutions. More in general, the article not only supports the validity of the misfit hypothesis but also shows how the nature and intensity of domestic preferences do explain differential patterns of adaptation to Europe (policy transformation in the Italian case, policy adjustment in the French case) in similar conditions of policy "misfit."

The financial and economic crisis has increased attention on EU social policy, yet little policy change has been realized. Drawing on Easton's political system approach, we differentiate demand emanating from the difficult situation following the crisis and support in form of the 2004, 2009 and 2014 European elections. On the output side, we show how social policy has been substantially removed from the priorities of the EU political agenda already prior to the crisis. We argue that it is the contrast between crisis-generated demand and a more long-term lack of policy support that empowered actors interested in deepening economic integration and austerity policies. We present new empirical data that shows how partisan and governmental preferences are channelled through the EU institutions and how thus, changing ideological composition of the Commission as agenda-setter and an asymmetrical intergovenmentalist turn, have been key driver for the substantial decline of EU social policy provision.