Populism and Euroscepticism. Italy in comparative perspective
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