publications

working papers

1. Without Roots: The Political Consequences of Plant Disease Epidemics

   Cremaschi, Simone, Bariletto, Nicola, and De Vries, Catherine

   OSF Preprint 2023

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   Plant disease epidemics are becoming more prevalent due to climate change, monoculture, and increased global connectivity, and inflict severe economic and social hardship on affected communities. Yet, little is known about their political consequences. We exploit the sudden and plausibly exogenous outbreak of the plant pathogen Xylella fastidiosa, which exterminated centuries-old olive groves in the Italian region of Puglia starting in 2013, to examine the political consequences of plant disease epidemics. We combine quantitative difference-in-differences analysis of municipal-level data with qualitative fieldwork in affected municipalities using a novel case selection procedure. We find a 2.2-percentage-point excess vote share for far-right parties, document the outbreak’s economic and socio-cultural consequences, and outline a mechanism rooted in a community narrative of abandonment by the state and ruling elites. Together, our findings reveal an important driver of support for the far right

2. Geographies of Discontent: Public Service Deprivation and the Rise of the Far Right in Italy

   Cremaschi, Simone, Rettl, Paula, Cappelluti, Marco, and De Vries, Catherine

   OSF Preprint 2023

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   Electoral support for far-right parties is often linked to geographies of discontent. We argue that public service deprivation, defined as reduced access to public services at the local level, plays an important role in explaining these patterns. By exploiting an Italian reform that reduced access to local public services in municipalities with fewer than 5,000 residents we demonstrate that far-right support in national elections increased more after the reform in affected municipalities than in unaffected ones. We use geo-coded individual-level survey data and party rhetoric data to explore the mechanisms underlying this result. Our findings suggest that exposure to the reform increased concerns about immigration, and that far-right parties increasingly linked public services to immigration in their rhetoric after the reform. These demand and supply dynamics help us understand how public service deprivation shapes geographic patterns in far-right support.

3. The Political Legacies of Wartime Resistance: How Local Communities in Italy Keep Anti-fascist Sentiments Alive

   Cremaschi, Simone, and Masullo, Juan

   UNU-WIDER Working Paper 2023

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   Can past wartime experiences other than violence have long-term effects on political attitudes and behaviours? How are these legacies sustained across generations and beyond those who directly experienced war? We explore these questions in Italy, a country whose democratic institutions were forged after a civil war (1943–45) fought between an armed resistance movement and Nazi-Fascist forces. We argue that local experiences of resistance left anti-fascist legacies that can be translated into contemporary political action. We detail a process of community-based intergenerational transmission linking past wartime experiences and recent political outcomes consisting of three core activities—memorialization, localization, and mobilization—put forward by memory entrepreneurs. To empirically substantiate this argument, we use a multi-method design that combines a statistical analysis of original georeferenced data across Italian municipalities and a within-case analysis of a purposely selected locality. Our study advances the growing literature on the long-term political legacies of war by improving our understanding of the processes and mechanisms underlying the transmission of political memories over time and across generations. Moreover, it emphasizes armed resistance as a critical source of war’s long-term political legacies and explores political effects beyond electoral and party politics.

4. Disaster Relief Trumps Demand for Environmental Policy

   Cremaschi, Simone, and Stanig, Piero

   OSF Preprint 2023

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   We empirically assess two contrasting predictions that disasters related to climate change raise support for (1) environmentalist parties and (2) incumbents that successfully provide disaster relief. We study the electoral effects of Vaia, a devastating storm that hit the mountainous area of northeast Italy in 2018. We measure the storm’s material consequences combining satellite and georeferenced data on forest disruption, blackout-related changes in nightlights intensity, and damage relief, and exploit the stark variation in damage intensity between adjacent and closely similar municipalities in a stringent difference-in-differences design. The storm significantly increased support for the regional incumbent—the radical-right Lega in most affected provinces—and did not generate positive electoral returns for parties with environmentalist platforms. More research is needed to understand under which conditions exposure to extreme weather events activates support for environmentalist policy.

peer reviewed articles

1. Immigrants and Legal Status: Do Personal Contacts Matter?

   Cremaschi, Simone, and Devillanova, Carlo

   Population, Space and Place, 2020

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   Using unique Italian survey data on both documented and undocumented immigrants, we empirically quantify the correlation between different types of personal contacts and immigrants’ documentation probability, while also uncovering the contacts’ indirect associations via immigrant labour market outcomes (employment status and job characteristics). Our results indicate that contacts with both natives and family members have a positive and quantitatively large effect on immigrant documentation probability, conditional on a large set of covariates. Contacts with members of the same ethnic group, by contrast, increase documentation probability only moderately, an effect explainable by these co-ethnics’ association with employment probability. Moreover, our findings support the hypothesis that native contacts can connect immigrants with jobs that favour documentation.

2. Undocumented Immigration in Times of Recession [in Italian]

   Cremaschi, Simone, Devillanova, Carlo, Fasani, Francesco, and Frattini, Tommaso

   Economia & Lavoro, 2016

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   This paper analyses microdata from three different sources in order to quantify the impact of the economic recession on undocumented immigrants in Italy and to compare their labour market outcomes in recent years with the performance of native workers and documented immigrants. This study documents for the first time a dramatic deterioration of employment outcomes and housing conditions of undocumented immigrants during the economic crisis started in 2008. In particular, the reduction in the share of employed workers is about three times larger among immigrants lacking legal status than among legally resident immigrants. Differently from what observed for this latter group, among undocumented immigrants the fall in employment affects both genders in a similar way. If immigrant workers are generally more vulnerable in the labour market than natives, the lack of legal status is associated with even higher exposure to the detrimental effects of economic downturns. [In Italian]

book chapters

1. Do Non-State Armed Groups Influence Each Other in Attack Timing and Frequency? Generating, Analyzing, and Comparing Empirical Data and Simulation

   Cremaschi, Simone, Kirdemir, Baris, Masullo, Juan, Pah, Adam R., Payette, Nicolas, and Yarlagadda, Rithvik

   In Computational Conflict Research (eds. Deutschmann, Emanuel and Lorenz, Jan and Nardin, Luis G. and Natalini, Davide and Wilhelm, Adalbert F. X.), Springer 2020

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   Non-State Armed Groups (NSAGs) operate in complex environments, commonly existing as one of the many organizations engaged in one-sided violent attacks against the state and/or the civilian population. When trying to explain the execution and timing of these attacks, most theories look at NSAGs’ internal organizational features or how these groups interact with the state or civilian population. In this study, we take a different approach: we use a self-exciting temporal model to ask if the behavior of one NSAG affects the behavior of other groups operating in the same country and if the actions of groups with actual ties (i.e., groups with some recognized relationship) have a larger effect than those with environmental ties (i.e., groups simply operating in the same country). We focus on three cases where multiple NSAGs operated at the same time: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Colombia, from 2001 to 2005. We find mixed results for the notion that the actions of one NSAG influence the actions of others operating in the same conflict. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we find evidence that NSAG actions do influence the timing of attacks by other NSAGs; however, there is no discernible link between NSAG actions and the timing of attacks in Colombia. Nevertheless, we do consistently find that there is no significant difference between the effect that actual or environmental ties could have in these three cases.

book reviews

1. Among Italy’s Outcasts. Review of Ciao Ousmane. The Hidden Exploitation of Italy’s Migrant Workers, by Hsiao-Hung Pai.

   Cremaschi, Simone

   The Political Quarterly, 2021

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2. Review of Karen Schönwälder, Söner Petermann, Jörg Hüttermann, Steven Vertovec, Miles Hewstone, Dietlind Stolle, Katharina Schmid, and Thomas Schmitt, “Diversity and Contact. Immigration and Social Integration in German Cities.”

   Cremaschi, Simone

   Sociologica, 2017

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