Interview of Fulvio Attinà, Chairman of the Italian Political Science Association from 2005 to 2007.

by Giliberto Capano | Published in issue1 /
This article: Bookmark | Digg | PDF | Print

Fulvio, how important is it, from a professional point of view, to be chairperson of the national political science association?
It is something to be proud of, because is a kind of collective acknowledgement of one’s professional quality.

Which are the most important problems you have had to deal with during your term of office?
Generally speaking, I’ve had to tackle the problem of insufficient communication and information. We needed to provide our members with more information about what is going on within the Italian and International political science communities. We also needed to improve communications with the outside world – that is, with socio-economic actors, political institutions, and so on – regarding our own existence and aims. I am really convinced that we did well on this issue, and the feedback has been very positive.

You also tried to reform the association’s statute. How did this work out?
I was, and still am, strongly convinced that we need to create a more direct relationship between the chairperson and the association’s members. The chairperson’s role and powers are mediated by the Executive Committee, in which he or she is a kind of “primus inter pares”. Furthermore, I think that our association, despite the fact that it has to maintain its academic status and mission, nevertheless needs to open up more to the outside world. We should invite non academics (such as politicians, political journalists, etc) to get involved in our association. In short, we would need to modernize the association.
However, the amendment of the association’s statute is a very delicate issue. So even if we members of the Executive Committee worked a lot on this issue, we failed to come to an all-round agreement which would have enabled us to present a joint proposal to the assembly. I sincerely hope that the new chairperson will be more successful in this task.

What about the level of members’ participation? How much does membership mean to colleagues?
The feeling of membership is weak, that is, it exists but is nevertheless weak. Colleagues participate in, and attend, the association’s various activities if they are “directly” requested to do so. Otherwise, the degree of spontaneous participation is very low. I think that the level of institutional identification continues to be weak, particularly since the association has only really started to function well in the last six or seven years. Before that, it was blighted by serious organizational problems and a substantial lack of rootedness (also due to the limited number of political scientists with tenure). The latter number has increased substantially in recent years, and things have started to work better as a result.

As one of the most “internationalized” of Italy’s political scientists, what do you think of the Italian Political Science Association viewed from a comparative perspective?
I do not believe that the association is fulfilling its true promise. Italian political science in general has considerable potential, but as yet has failed to fulfill that potential. this is a result of the low degree of associative identification. However, changes are up and coming: the rate of attendance at our annual conferences shows that the active involvement of young scholars is much higher than that of their older colleagues. So we firmly believe that things will significantly improve in the future.

And what about the state of political science as such? You have worked in this field for almost forty years now, and have had the opportunity to witness the emergence of Italian political science. How do you see the present state of Italian political science?
Very positively. Our numbers have increased, and the quality and quantity of our research and articles has increased substantially. We have covered just about every single sub-field of political science (from international relations to public policy, from comparative politics to electoral behavior), and I think we have only lacked one thing, albeit an extremely important one: creativity. We have never managed to say anything truly original.
In recent years, there has also been a significant increase in the international involvement of Italy’s political scientists. Fifteen years ago very few of us went abroad to international conferences. Nowadays, the Italian presence at such events is more substantial, although it could certainly be even greater.

What are your wishes for the future of the association?
I sincerely hope that we abandon the conservative attitude that tends to characterize new academic disciplines, and thus their professional associations. Political science is now a fully-institutionalized discipline within the Italian academic context, and so the time has come for the Italian Political Science Association to be more courageous.