Polis, a journal published by Il Mulino on behalf of the Fondazione Istituto Carlo Cattaneo research foundation in Bologna, offers its readers studies and empirical research on social and political phenomena in contemporary Italy and other Western countries. Since 1987 sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists, demographers and social historians have rendered the journal a prestigious multidisciplinary forum for analysing the evolution and transformations of society and politics in a comparative perspective.