This article aims to highlight the impact of strategic culture on Italian attitude to war and peace. The first section shows how both structural interpretations based on the influence of international variables and domestic models that neglect the cultural dimension offer no adequate explanations of Italy’s military behaviour. The second section reviews the literature on strategic culture and its usefulness to explain the Italian case. The third section examines the characteristics of Italy’s strategic culture through the period of the Republic, and the fourth examines the influence of ideational factors on its military behaviour abroad. In this section, a series of hypotheses derived from structural and cultural models are tested using data from the Correlates of War dataset. The conclusion provides a summary of the research findings that emerged from the empirical analysis.

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This article carries out a quantitative analysis of the military behaviour of Italy from 1946 to 2010 using neoclassical realism as the theoretical framework. By overcoming the limits of traditional explanations of Italian security and defence policies, neoclassical realism provides new insight into Italy's involvement in militarized interstate disputes by taking into account both systemic and domestic variables. The method used is a combination of dyad analysis introduced by Stuart Bremer in 1992 and the analysis of unit-level variables, which is distinctive of neoclassical realism. An analytical model is developed, and bivariate and multivariate analyses are performed to explain the impact of the variables. By empirically testing a set of hypotheses, the study argues that Italian military behaviour is a function of the country's relative power as well as the levels of elite instability and regime vulnerability, the extraction capacity of the state, and the degree of elite consensus. The study contributes to the existing scientific debate on the determinants of Italian international behaviour and to the literature on neoclassical realism by demonstrating that its main propositions apply to a case of middle power and that these propositions can be tested on a large scale through quantitative approaches.

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