Italian Democracy

How It Works

Gianfranco Pasquino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351401081
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This textbook, from one of Italy's most eminent scholars, provides broad coverage and critique of Italian politics and society.

Providing the readers with the knowledge necessary to understand the working of the Italian political system, it also offers answers to some of the most important challenges facing the country – and other contemporary democracies – today, such as populism, anti-politics and corruption. Critical but underpinned by thorough data and analysis, it presents alternative views alongside the author's interpretation. Crucially, the book uses a comparative framework to explain Italy's transformation and evaluate its performance. Comparing the rules, institutions, parties and actors at work in the most important European political systems – France, Germany, Great Britain – with those in Italy, the Italian context is better understood and assessed in contrast.

This text will be essential reading for students and scholars of Italian politics and European politics, and more broadly for comparative politics and democracy.

1 A classic parliamentary Republic

Since 1948, the Constitution, institutions and electoral rules have established Italy as a parliamentary Republic. This chapter explains why and how the Italian Constitution matters and briefly suggests how political parties have carved out a role for themselves. It focuses on the many misplaced and failed attempts to introduce modifications to the Constitution and stresses that knowledge of the rules of the political game in Italy is necessary to understand the functioning of the political system, its challenges and its transformations.

Comparing political systems

Stereotypes concerning Italian politics abound. They are frequently formulated by Italian scholars and commentators and then repeated by scholars and commentators outside Italy. The latter are often well-intentioned, but they deliberately underestimate the problems and disadvantages of the Italian political, social, economic and cultural system to some extent (Newell 2010; Emmott 2012). They seem unwilling to criticize the country they are studying and whose politics they are describing (a notable exception is Bufacchi and Burgess 1998). Often, they are embarrassed by certain events and politicians, and only then does their criticism become less muted and more focused. Most of the time, what appears in the media, as well as in scholarly articles, are the myths of Italian politics; of course, this does exist, but it should not be highlighted at the expense of less superficial explorations and better grounded assessments. Unfortunately, once the snowball of folklore and misleading comments becomes an avalanche, all efforts to provide nuanced interpretations are bound to be faced with very many, very high obstacles. Hence, such efforts fail to redress the situation. As a consequence, stereotypes (continue to) prevail and are responsible for the surprise experienced by those who are interested in Italian politics when some apparently unexpected event takes place.

In recent times, the three most unexpected events have occurred at the polls: not the 4 March 2018 elections (discussed in detail later in the chapter), but specifically: (i) the March 1994 electoral (and political) victory of Berlusconi’s coalition; (ii) the remarkable number of votes won by the Five Star Movement in their first national appearance at the 24 February 2013 elections; and (iii) Prime Minister Renzi’s disastrous defeat at his constitutional referendum held on 4 December 2016. Although there is an element of truth in the statement that all three events were also the products of a significant amount of Italian electoral volatility, none was totally unpredictable. They were all on the cards. All three deserve attention because they substantially changed the course of Italian politics. I do not go as far as to argue that they paved the way for the 2018 victory of the Five Star Movement and the League, but they certainly changed the “feelings” of many Italians about the politics they wanted and thought they needed.

However, the main contention of this book is that Italian politics can be satisfactorily interpreted and understood only through a comparative perspective: that is, by having some knowledge of similar political systems and, whenever possible, by utilizing comparative analyses (here I follow Giovanni Sartori’s fundamental lesson that we should use comparative analysis, found in Sartori 1982). Only then will we be in a position to explain and evaluate the similarities and differences between Italy and other contemporary democracies in order convincingly to make sense of the functioning, problems and evolution of Italian politics and to predict changes and their consequences. To begin, therefore, I provide an introduction to the institutional context of the politics of Italy. First, I highlight the features that are absolutely indispensable for understanding and explaining any – and possibly all – political phenomena. I then draw some preliminary conclusions that will guide my analysis in the following chapters.

Parliament, government and the President of the Republic

Since 1948, Italy has been a parliamentary democracy (see Box 1.1). The defining feature of all parliamentary democracies is that their governments are “elected” by Parliament. I use here Walter Bagehot’s definition of the verb (Bagehot 2001), where elected means chosen or inaugurated. All parliamentary governments remain in office and continue to function as long as they enjoy the support (the confidence) of Parliament, but they can be replaced at any time by Parliament. In the post-1992 Italian political and institutional turmoil, these basic facts have become the subject of several damaging controversies and clashes. The members of the Constituent Assembly, elected in 1946 to draft the Constitution, had harboured almost no doubt. They decided that the Italian Parliament had to be – and had to remain – bicameral. The bicameral Parliament had to occupy a central role in the political system. The government had to enjoy an explicit vote of confidence from both houses, meaning that an absolute majority of parliamentarians would be asked to visibly commit themselves to supporting the formation and the functioning of the government. Those who drafted the Italian Constitution, being familiar with the instability not only of pre-Fascist Italian governments but of all parliamentary governments in general, approved a recommendation, which has since been quoted frequently, “to look for and to find mechanisms to stabilize the government” (this is discussed further in Chapter 5). That mechanism, the “constructive vote of no confidence”, was brilliantly devised by the Germans, who drafted the 1949 Fundamental Law (Grundgesetz); together with other factors, this has been responsible for the extraordinarily long tenures of German Chancellors. Since 1949, there have been fewer German Chancellors than British Prime Ministers. The Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl holds the record: sixteen uninterrupted years in office from 1982 to 1998. Drafting their own Constitution, the Spanish promptly imported a slightly revised variant of the constructive vote of no confidence, and this has significantly contributed to the stability of their own Presidents of the government. The Socialist Felipe González remained in office from 1982 to 1996. However, as we will see, the problem of Italian Prime Ministers is less their short tenures than their allegedly limited political and institutional powers. It remains to be seen whether this is the consequence of the so-called “complex of the tyrant”¹ or of the type of Italian bicameralism or of the nature and structure of Italian parties.

Box 1.1 Year of introduction of selected post-1945 West European Constitutions

Italy: 1948

Germany: 1949, revised in 1990

Austria: 1955

France: 1958 – Fifth Republic, revised in 2001 and 2002

Greece: 1975, several revisions

Portugal: 1976, some revisions in the 1980s

Spain: 1978

The bicameral Parliament, House of Deputies and Senate were the product of long-term factors as well as an evaluation of the situation in 1946–48. Not only had the Italian political system featured a bicameral system after the 1861 formation of the unitary state; bicameralism had already existed in its predecessor, the Kingdom of Piedmont–Sardinia. Thus, a not insignificant tradition played a role. It is not possible to include here the entire discussion on bicameralism held in the Constituent Assembly. However: (i) the Communists were in favour of a unicameral Parliament, arguing that popular sovereignty is indivisible, and therefore it should not be allocated to two different chambers; (ii) those who desired a truly regional state pleaded the case for the Senate to become a chamber of territorial representation (but, in this regard, (too) little was achieved); and (iii) in the end, the case was won by those who argued that a second chamber might be capable of correcting mistakes made under pressure and in emergency situations and would improve the quality of legislation. Hence, Italian bicameralism was the result neither of a plot against the left nor of institutional mistakes. The fact that the government must win a vote of confidence in both chambers has not been a problem – except in a couple of cases – during the entire life of the Republic, as will be argued in Chapter 4, which closely analyses and assesses the political and institutional performance of Parliament. For better or worse, the Italian Republic has been and remains a parliamentary democracy.

Many statements to the contrary notwithstanding, no Second Italian Republic has made its appearance.² Only when the most fundamental rules of the game change, as well as the representative and governing institutions, can one legitimately state that a new Republic has come into being. The transition from traditional parliamentarism to semi-presidentialism in France was a qualitative change that allows – indeed obliges – scholars and politicians to distinguish between the Fourth (1946–58) and the Fifth Republic (1958–). Moreover, adopting the label “Second Republic” does not convey any useful information regarding either the political system or Italian democracy, nor does it improve our knowledge of their nature or functioning in any way. Also, the form of the Italian state – that is, a unitary state with some devolution of powers to the regions – though challenged, has not undergone any significant change. The model of government (analysed in Chapter 5), steeped in the very close relationships between the government and Parliament, has remained what was designed and agreed upon in the 1948 Constitution. In terms of rules, it is only the electoral law that has been changed drastically, and often – indeed, too frequently – revised. (I deal extensively with electoral laws in Chapter 2.) Nevertheless, the law drafted by Ettore Rosato, MP of the Democratic Party, that was utilized in the March 2018 elections is widely and rightly criticized and will probably be revised once more or jettisoned. Inevitably, the Rosato law has had an impact on the electoral campaign and its outcome, but it has not ushered in a new “regime”.

From the very beginning of the Republic, Italian parties were the backbone of the political system. In a short period of time, they acquired and wielded so much power of all kinds – not only political, but also economic, social and cultural – that they gave birth to what was called partitocrazia (“partyocracy”, which is discussed later; see especially Hine 1993). All those Italian parties that were dominant systemic actors for almost four decades either disappeared in the 1992–94 period or have been obliged to transform profoundly. New parties have made their appearance since then, but, on the whole, the party system remains quite unstructured (this is dealt with in Chapter 3). Again, although the 2018 party system is totally different from, say, the 1968 party system, the overall transformation cannot be considered sufficient to give birth to a new regime. More importantly, on the whole the functioning of parliamentary and governmental institutions and the institutional circuit have not been affected by any significant reform (see Chapters 4 and 6 on Parliament and the Presidency of the Republic).

The first momentous decision in post-war Italy, after its liberation from Fascism, was the choice to be made between the existing monarchy and a Republic. Through a popular referendum held on 2 June 1946 (this date is celebrated annually as the birth of the Republic), 24,946,878 Italians (89.09 per cent of those eligible to vote) went to the polls. Out of 23,437,143 valid votes, 12,718,641 (54.3 per cent) chose the Republic while 10,718,502 (45.7 per cent) preferred the monarchy.³ The king, Umberto II, was sent into exile (to Cascais, Portugal). On the same day the voters elected a Constituent Assembly charged with writing a Constitution to replace the previous constitutional document, the octroyé, drawn up by the Savoyard King Charles Albert in 1848, which had survived under Fascism.

Drafting the Constitution

The newly born democratic Republic needed its own Constitution. In 1946, very few constitutional democratic charters existed that could be imitated, imported or adapted. Although much appreciated by a number of Italian Constitution makers, the United Kingdom could not serve as an example because of the absence of a written Constitution. The Italians could not learn or import much from the Low Countries or from the little known Nordic democracies, which, incidentally, were all monarchies. At the time, no other European country was a democracy. The model of the Presidential Republic, as exemplified by the USA, made a brief appearance in the constitutional debate, but the popular election of a President was considered too risky, and potentially divisive in a country that had to construct its democracy almost from scratch. Although quite a number of prominent Italian law scholars had studied in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1919–33), obviously that Constitution had been sunk by its tragic history.

Today, positive references are made to the German Grundgesetz (the Fundamental Law, so-called in order not to exclude the possibility of reunification with the Eastern Zone) of the Federal Republic of Germany. There is a lot to learn from and to imitate in the Constitution and institutions of contemporary Germany, but the Italian Constitution was approved on 27 December 1947, several months before the enactment in May 1949 of the German Grundgesetz. In the end, for many political and cultural reasons, only France could play the unfortunate role of a model. Indeed, the institutional architecture of the Italian Republic resembles very closely what was written in the Constitution of the Fourth French Republic. Interestingly, the French Constitution was challenged by General de Gaulle, who strongly contributed to the defeat in a referendum of the first version, but the second, approved version was always considered by many French authorities and citizens as being largely inadequate in its fundamental structures and it was never fully accepted. It lasted only twelve years: from 1946 to 1958. The Fifth French Republic, which reflects the political and constitutional thinking of de Gaulle and his collaborators, is sometimes mentioned by Italian reformers and, together with the double ballot majority electoral system, considered by some scholars and a fe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of acronyms and abbreviations
• Preface
• 1. A classic parliamentary Republic
• 2. One, two, many electoral laws
• 3. Political parties, party government and partyocracy
• 4. A Parliament of parties
• 5. Governments
• 6. The accordion of the Presidents
• 7. Civil society
• 8. Italy and the European Union
• 9. The quality of democracy
• Index