Government-Opposition in Southern European Countries during the Economic Crisis

Elisabetta De Giorgi is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the New University of Lisbon. She has a PhD in Comparative and European Politics from the University of Siena, where she still contributes to the research activities of the Centre for the Study of Political Change (CIRCaP). Her main research interests are parliaments from a comparative perspective - in particular, parliamentary opposition and the law-making process - political parties and party systems. She has published several chapters in books and articles in, among others, the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Politica in Italia/Italian Politics, Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée, Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, South European Society and Politics.Catherine Moury is an Assistant Professor at the New University of Lisbon. Her research focuses on institutional change in the European Union and on coalition governments, about which she has published in journals such as the European Journal of Public Policy, West European Politics and Party Politics. She is the author of Coalition Government and Party Mandate: How coalition agreements constrain ministerial action (Routledge, 2012) and Changing rules of delegation: A contest of Power for Comitology (with A. Héritier, C. Bisschoff and C-F. Bergström, Oxford University Press, 2012). Her article 'Explaining the European Parliament's Right to Appoint and Invest the Commission: Interstitial Institutional Change', published in West European Politics in 2007, was awarded the Vincent Wright Memorial Prize and the Gulbenkian Prize for the internationalization of Social Science.