The Scientist has an interesting opinion piece by a group of European researchers on how decisions are made about tenure in Italy. An excerpt:

“…internal politics, cronyism, and exchanges of favors among committee members are strongly facilitated in Italy by the very limited weight that the rules assign to scientific excellence. What would be the motivation for doing high-quality research when only 10 (in some Universities only five!) “publications” are sufficient, even for full professorship, and presentations to congresses (with no peer review) may carry almost the same weight as full papers? … All this helps explain why only 10.3% of the EU scientific publications come from Italy, compared to 15.2% from France, 20.3% from Germany, and 23.7% from the UK.”

Read the whole thing here.