Giulio Mattiazzi

Lo studio nasce dalla manifesta necessità di analizzare il contesto locale nel quale inserire un progetto di partecipazione, contesto che si connota marcatamente per l’imminente decadenza dei Consigli di Quartiere. Questa esperienza pluridecennale, registra l’indagine, presenta luci ed ombre; ora si profila l’opportunità di concordare un percorso partecipativo che, raccogliendo i vantaggi di quell’esperienza, riesca a superarne i limiti. Per questo emerge un disegno assai più ampio e ambizioso, che chiameremo “La Partecipazione Oltre il Quartiere”, che si snoda lungo tre linee guida: la formazione sui percorsi partecipativi (anche per sportelli di ascolto attivo
presenti nei quartieri); le Consulte civiche, il luogo dove si raccolgono i soggetti della comunità locale che faranno da tramite fra l’Amministrazione centrale ed il territorio (nell’indagine, gli autori le chiamano “Arene Partecipative”); la gestione partecipata degli spazi di quartiere.
(…) Affidare questa indagine a “osservatori attenti ma distanti” della realtà padovana (come essi stessi si definiscono) ci fornisce uno sguardo “dislocato”, di respiro internazionale, a cavallo tra diverse realtà, che non corre il rischio di essere influenzato dalle tensioni cittadine.
Essendo pienamente consapevole che una volontà politica collegiale e prolungata nel tempo è decisiva per dare forma concreta a questo cammino, ho l’obbligo di sottolineare l’importanza di promuovere un dialogo sociale e percorsi partecipativi onesti e pregnanti di contenuti per ri-costruire un patto sociale con le cittadine e i cittadini padovani.
(dalla Prefazione dell’Assessora Silvia Clai)

‘Can overseas voting help us understand domestic politics in Italy and its changes?’ (p. VII). Such is the ‘leit motif’ of this ambitious book, whose purported aim is to shed light on a too often overlooked aspect of political and electoral studies, that is electoral behaviour within so-called emigrant constituencies, with a focus on the Italian case. Alongside several other examples, indeed, Italy is today one of the many countries granting external voting rights to its (non-resident) citizens. Despite the global scope of such phenomenon, however, only a small number of scholars has systematically enquired into its causes and consequences so far. This is especially the case for Italy, whose approximately 5 million citizens residing outside of the national boundaries make it, without any doubt, a reference case in Western Europe and beyond. In this sense, the effort of the authors to build a first well-rounded analysis on how Italian emigrants behave at homeland elections certainly needs to be praised by itself. The book, which is a collective volume edited by two scholars with a significant track record on this topic, Simone Battiston and Stefano Luconi, is overall structured in eight chapters. Each of them aims at dealing with a specific country-level scenario where non-resident Italian citizens are allowed to cast their vote at homeland elections. The main starting points, as one can easily guess, are the two most recent electoral events of the Italian political system, that is, the results of the Constitutional Referendum in December 2016 and the results of the General Election of March 2018. Against such background, the book immediately taps into two recurrent issues of the Italian overseas voting system. The first one is the constantly lower electoral participation abroad, decreased from 38.9% in 2006 to 29.8% in 2018, coupled with public and media’s carelessness towards the vote of Italians abroad. Hence the idea of a substantively ‘dead’ political right (at least in the minds of voters and academic or political observers) and for this reason in need of an autopsy, rather than an anatomy, as the authors themselves suggest in the book’s title. The second one, on the other hand, is the notable resume of Italian emigration over the last years, that is, a figure in stark contrast to the previous one. This latter makes it reasonable to wonder whether the layering of ‘old’ and ‘new’ emigrants, with their heterogeneous needs, ideas and identities, could somehow explain variations in election results abroad, and particularly the local fortunes (or failings) of specific parties nowadays. The combination of these two interesting elements definitely represents an inspired idea, allowing the authors to set up a convincing framework for analysis for the succession of case studies presented in the following chapters. Battiston and Luconi anticipate these contents in an