Euroscepticism represents a significant issue for Italy. Despite most of the Italian citizens backed the European Union project for a long time, their feelings dramatically changed in the last decade. The past EU-enthusiasm turned into an increasing amount of mistrust and an open opposition against both the EU's institutions and the project of a European supranational polity. These attitudes have been fostered by various factors that can be summarize as calculation, community and cues (Marks and Hooghe, 2005). Moreover, some recent literature assesses that the citizens' political stance towards European Union can also be conceived as a new social cleavage, underlying the structuration of the Italian political system (Belluati and Serricchio, 2014).
Furthermore, Euroscepticism and, generally, the negative perception of Europe can be interpreted not only as an indicator of dissatisfaction towards politics, but also as a symptom of populism. Euroscepticism took new shapes and declinations after the 2007-2008 crisis, as well as populist parties increased their consensus. However, the causes and the kind of relation between Euroscepticism and populism remains mostly overlooked. To address these shortcoming, we use Italy as case study, disentangling the several dimensions of these overlapping phenomena to gain a more nuanced understanding of this growing interaction. We posit that Euroscepticism constitutes one of the most important features of the contemporary populism
As we have indicated, populism and Euroscepticism are well described and investigated in the scientific literature. However, the current research contributes to the debate in several additional ways, advancing the scientific knowledge of this topic. Its originality can be found in at least four dimensions.
The first, it explores a fast-changing phenomenon with worldwide consequences. The financial crisis (2007-2008), the European debt crisis (2009-present) and the Migration crisis (2012-present) triggered a U-turn both to populism and Euroscepticism and fostered their growing interaction all over the globe. They posed serious challenges to the European states¿ status quo and the integration model propounded by EU elites. As a result, populist parties did considerable electoral gains at the national, state, and local levels of government in Western Europe during the last decade. The pro-Brexit activists identified the European Union as the origin of the social-economic bad performances of their countries and their success at the 2016 referendum represented a warning for the whole continent. Furthermore, Donald Trump adopted an anti-establishment rhetoric at the 2016 presidential elections and his victory impressed a new momentum to this global trend. This synthetic timeline well illustrates the significance of the topic we are dealing with.
The second reason, the importance of studying the causes and modes of the interaction between populism and Euroscepticism is particularly considerable by the Italian standpoint. Following the impressive electoral performances of Front National, Alliance for Germany, and Podemos, the success of the 5 Stars Movement, and League at the latest Italian parliamentary elections constitutes a breakthrough. Indeed, Italy is the first country experiencing a populist government. As a result, it represents a significant case for world politics, as was recently highlighted by the populist movements¿ guru Steve Bannon. The project members want to go beyond normative considerations to understand the deep political transformations that are occurring in our country.
The third dimension of interest of this project, broadly speaking, has a theoretical nature. Despite a lot of scholars investigated both populism and Euroscepticism, only few of them considered the causes and modes of their interaction (Taggart 1997; Kneuer 2018; Pirro and Van Kessel 2018). Anyway, it still remains largely overlooked. The notion that these are self-contained problems, one isolated from the other, is questioned by our project. We posit that the Euroscepticism constitutes one of the most important features of the contemporary populism and these two phenomena must be taken into consideration as two sides of the same coin both in public discourse and in academic debates. Both in Italy and in the rest of Europe, Eurosceptic political movements and parties are accused of being populist. And vice-versa, populist political parties are almost automatically perceived as Eurosceptic. Our project aims at bringing out the causes (why?) and the modalities (how?) of this interaction.
The last dimension of interest of the current project is methodological. The research work relies on a mixed-methods research strategy that combines qualitative and quantitative analysis to disentangle the relationship between populism and Euroscepticism. Moreover, the analysis will be conducted by a small group of investigators with heterogenous expertise, in order to be more sensitive to the several facets of a very complex topic.