The Università Commerciale “Luigi Bocconi” was established in 1902 as a private not for profit University, the first Italian university to grant a degree in economics. Nowadays Bocconi has about 14.000 students (11.000 undergraduates, 1.600 graduates, 1.700 enrolled in graduate programs, pre-experience, specialization, post-experience and Ph.D.), 700 faculty members and 500 administrative staff. The Faculty is composed by “tenured faculty”, “non-tenured faculty” and “part-time faculty” and they all provide a high international standard of education being international themselves or teaching in foreign languages.

Istituto di Pubblica Amministrazione e Sanità (IPAS)

The project will be based at the Institute of Bocconi University which is responsible for researching and teaching in the area of Public Administration and Management of Health Care and Non Profit Organisations (IPAS). The Institute is working since the early 1970s on three main areas: Public Administration, Healthcare Management and Policy, and Non Profit Management and Social Entrepreneurship. IPAS has a general mission that combines research, teaching and dissemination. The research mission of IPAS is to produce original, relevant and actionable knowledge on public, healthcare and non profit organisations and other institutions predominantly serving the public interest.

Simone Baglioni will be the scientist in charge for the Italian team. He is Research Fellow at the Bocconi University where he works in the framework of a Marie Curie Excellence Grant. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Geneva (Switzerland) in 2004. Before joining Bocconi he has taught social exclusion and civil society issues at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and has worked as a researcher at the Swiss Forum for Migration and Population Studies, University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland), at the University of Florence (Italy), and at the Swiss Graduate Institute for Public Administration Studies (IDHEAP), in Lausanne (Switzerland). His research interests include: civil society and social capital, immigration and asylum policies, unemployment and social exclusion.

Matteo Bassoli is research and teaching assistant at the Bocconi University (Milan), for Political Science, International Relations and Public Policy Analysis. He graduated, at the same university, in Economics and Social Discipline (2003) with a dissertation on "Deliberative arenas and new form of political participation", in 2007 he obtained a PhD in Comparative Analysis of Democracies (University of Pavia) with a thesis entitled "Public-private decision making and local democracy in Italian urban policies". In 2007 he participated in the Intune Winter School on "Citizenship and Europe-Elite, Experts and Mass Interview", at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve. He worked on participatory and network governance, both as researcher and consultant (Crema Municipality). He has collaborated with URGE - Research Unit on European Governance (www.urge.it), POLEIS - Centre of Comparative Political Research (www.unibocconi.it/poleis).His recent interests focus on local policies, social exclusion, political participation, unemployment, immigration and corporate social responsibility.

Paolo Graziano holds a degree in Political Science from the University of Pavia, a Master in Management and Economics of the Non-Profit Sector from Bocconi University and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Florence. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bocconi University and a Fellow of the Center for Research on Comparative Politics (POLEIS), Bocconi University. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques Centre d'Etudes Européens and at the University of California Berkeley, Political Science Department. Moreover he has been Coordinator and Professor of several courses at ISPI, the Italian Institute for Studies on International Politics. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the international research group, YEN-Young Europeanization Network, which is affiliated with the European Consortium for Political Science. He is Bocconi representative in RECWOWE, Network of Excellence (6th EU Research Framework Program). His research interests include Europeanization and European integration; local politics and policies for local development; the politics of welfare and welfare policies; participatory democracy.

Lorenzo Mosca was awarded the degree of PhD by the University of Florence in 2004. He then got a post-doctoral fellowship at the European University Institute and is currently research fellow at the Bocconi University (Milan). His research interests focus on political participation, political communication, ICTs and e-democracy, and social policies. He has personal experience of a wide range of methodologies and has been involved in several local, national and European collaborative research projects. These include, among others, YOUNEX (FP7), DEMOS (FP6) and EUROPUB (FP5). He is a member of the steering committee of the ECPR standing group on forms of participation and member of the SISP standing group on "Social Movements and Political Participation". He teaches in the James Madison University (Florence) and in the Boston college (Parma). He is part of the funding group of the journal “Partecipazione e Conflitto”. He has published extensively in international peer-reviewed scientific journals and articles in books translated into English, Spanish, French, German and Italian. His publications include some 50 articles and chapters, 1 edited book, 4 collective books with highly reputable academics and over 20 papers presented at national and international conferences.