Modern Italy

Representation and Reform

Paul Furlong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415015646
• eBook ISBN: 9781134979820
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Paul Furlong presents an introduction to Italian politics and policy-making, considering in detail the way in which Italy's recent history has affected its course of political and economic development. He looks at the policy process through the 1980s, analysing the practical results of the policy-making process in key areas, such as industry and the economy. He goes on to discuss the party-political and governmental developments of the 1990s. The book is designed throughout to illuminate the Italian case by applying a comparative framework. Italy has often been treated as an exception to any rule of Western European politics; there are, however, many features that the country holds in common with its EC neighbours.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Issues and explanations in Italian policy

‘When is the government going to fall, and is the system stable?’ Usually phrased more diplomatically, these tend to be the main concerns of the foreign policy communities of the developed world, not only about the world's problem cases but also, more privately, about one another. Whatever is the case about other countries, it is striking how much and how overtly these questions have dominated studies of Italian politics, with rather more pertinence than might be so for some of Italy's neighbours and for many beyond the foreign policy communities. Underlying them is a quest for the holy grail of Italian politics, the efficient secret which sustains the system in the face of government instability and apparently endemic political conflict.

This book does not pretend to be able to answer these dominant questions directly. This is a study of how public policy is made in Italy, and about the practical results of these processes in some key policy areas. Nevertheless, the picture which it builds up may assist readers in answering the dominant questions, and perhaps even in questioning the terms of the questions. The structure of the work assumes that the reader will not necessarily be familiar either with modern Italian politics or with its historical and cultural background. This chapter therefore begins by discussing the various ways in which Italian politics is commonly analysed and then introduces the main arguments of the book. The chapters which immediately follow describe the historical development of the Italian state, its constitutional and administrative structure, and the operations of the political parties. The second section of the book provides an explanatory framework and develops the arguments with particular reference to specific areas of policy.

EXPLANATIONS OF ITALIAN POLITICS—AN OVERVIEW

Italian political studies have been characterised for some time by a broad consensus about certain hypotheses, or perhaps better about certain overall impressions. There is a striking degree of agreement on several generalisations: political parties are central to the political system, public opinion holds politicians in low esteem, public administration is widely regarded as inefficient and difficult to reform, and the Italian economy, broadly speaking and with appropriate qualifications, is rather more successful than might be expected from the above description. It is the parties which constitute the new political Italy, and the new politics is held to be a constraint on the newer economics. Is this a satisfactory way of looking at the problem, and how else can we analyse the relationship between the two?

Because the political parties tend to be regarded as necessary evils, the interaction between the political sphere and the buoyant civil society has tended to be viewed in almost wholly negative terms, and has been dominated by the current explanations of the way the parties develop and interact. The term ‘civil society’ in this context refers to the groups and institutions, including the local organisations of political parties, which organise and articulate societal interests and values. It is used to identify the ways in which societies structure their interests and ideas prior to and distinct from state organisations. The term therefore enables us to identify political activity without necessarily including any reference to the state but without treating society as a collection of atomised individuals.¹

From the 1960s until the mid-1980s, the most popular explanations attributed the ailments of the Italian political system typically to ‘political lag’.² This term referred to the persistence of anachronistic political processes in a modern economy—the anachronisms being the extremist political parties, the influence of organised religion, and the inefficiency of the traditional state structures. In this view, politics in Italy is constrained, slow to respond to socio-economic change, because of the shape of the party-political system laid down in the late 1940s, because of the reliance on clientelism, and because of the difficulties the parties have in reforming the state structures. One formulation of this, which emphasises the continuities with the previous regimes, argues that the compromise and clientelism of the old Liberal state (1860–1922) adapted to the demands of mass politics by developing a more modern but still stultifying and wasteful policy immobilism. Immobilism in this context is the term used to refer to the incapacity of the Liberal state to respond to changing international and domestic pressures because of extensive reciprocal veto powers within the restricted governing elites. Clientelism refers to the use of state resources of various kinds to develop relatively long-term personal electoral support.

The state can only circumvent the new immobilism, runs the conventional argument, by allowing sub-governments to form. Subgovernments therefore represent in this argument the dynamic modern organisation given a tacit or even explicit leave to direct development in specific sectors or regions—examples would be the Cassa for southern development, Federconsorzi and Coldiretti for agriculture, IRI and ENI in the heavy industrial sector supporting the non-profitable infrastructure and labour market requirements of manufacturing industry. Some of these cases will be discussed in detail in the later chapters. Another example would be the state-supported pension and health insurance schemes, dominated by INAM, the fund for private employees.

The political lag approach is not necessarily misleading, but suffers from the limitation that it places the burden of explanation on the parties and treats them almost as independent variables, responding to societal changes in specific ways but unaffected by their own changing relationship with the state. It also treats clientelism and immobilism as unfortunate empirical phenomena not as functional parts of the system, and neglects the independent scope of the institutions themselves. The idea that in some way clientelism and modern economic development might be interdependent through the political system cannot be readily accommodated in an explanation which begins by ascribing wholly negative effects to the one and generally positive consequences to the other.

It also became clear that the term immobilism was insufficiently precise to explain the full range of policy, particularly since it seemed to suggest misleadingly a complete lack of major change. But there certainly has been change. For example, in the four sectors, referred to above, the Cassa and Federconsorzi have been dissolved, and INAM's functions have been radically reformed. Only the state participation system retains significant independent authority (after some privatisation). But while as we shall see the debate over party politics gave way to a more complex analysis of the voter-party relationship, the ‘political lag’ view impressed itself on the elites as a more continuous explanation for the repeated failures of the policy side of the political system.

In the 1970s, the first major efforts at studying how policy actually worked concentrated on the national and local uses of power by the parties—the concern being to identify the means by which the political parties could (to use one of the fashionable terms of the period) ‘occupy the state’.³ When the Communists supported the governing coalition in 1976, there was a widespread expectation that the new alliance could develop new uses for the instruments of office. The failure of that experience, the reversion to a five-party coalition in 1979 and the recession of the early 1980s reinforced interest in institutional reform, again within the context of the failure of the political system to keep pace with the needs of the economy.

The 1980s were characterised by an unprecedented degree of concern for institutional reform. This failed to produce lasting agreement over how to cope with new or radically altered conformations of interest intermediation in society at large. Underlying the disagreement over particular policy there was consensus at least about the need for major institutional reform, but the prescriptions differ over principle. The debates on the issue of institutional reform are revealing for their assumptions at least, if not for their empirical basis. That they issued eventually into the almost desperate search for reform in the 1990s makes them even more pertinent.

Underlying them are three differing views of how the system works. The most popular view among the political elites themselves, more of a bundle of serious anxieties than a problem with an explanation, uses the term ‘ungovernability’ to refer to the difficulties of the political system.⁴ Implicitly this view acknowledges both the importance of the parties and the difficulty of reforming them. It turns attention towards the dysfunctions of the institutions, particularly of Parliament. Though there are some extended and more academic versions of the argument, the ungovernability syndrome is most influentially described in the pages of the newspapers close to the DC (the Christian Democrats) and the other governing parties. Here particular emphasis is placed on the capacity of irresponsible parliamentary opposition to dilute or to negate the efforts of beleaguered governments. The main concern of the DC, reflected in part in the agenda of the reform debate, is to restore their own control over the position of Prime Minister and if possible to enhance the stability of the office, but without fundamentally altering the way in which policy is made; this strategy would seek to increase the capacity of the DC to integrate a wider range of interests and to give civil society a secure capable interlocutor in government.

An influential part of the radical right shares the concern over ‘ungovernability’, and places considerable emphasis on institutional reform, with the aim of enhancing the executive arm at the expense of all organised political groupings—hence their concern has been to promote the reform of Parliamentary procedure and rather more generically the reform of Public Administration. Some of their leaders such as the industrialist Carlo De Benedetti identified ‘corporative pressures’ at the root of the difficulties.⁵ Another version of this is to describe the existing system as ‘consociational.’ These phrases are code for ‘clientelist practice’, but they also cover what the Right take to be excessive involvement of the trade unions in policy-making—the activities of the unions are thus unsympathetically associated by the Right with party-based patronage. The success of Italy's economy in recovering from the recession of the early 1980s (when Italy managed growth rates of over 3 per cent per year from 1985 to 1989) is used by them as evidence of what Italy's potential could be if only its government matched the efficiency and drive of the private sector. A variant of this, associated with the DC leader Mario Segni, concentrates on the need for electoral reform with the explicit aim of reducing the number of parties and producing strong governments.

An indication of the influence of the ungovernability argument in the early 1980s was the establishment of the Bozzi Commission, a joint commission of both chambers of Parliament to investigate the institutional deficiencies of the system and to make proposals for reform. There was sufficient concern for the high-powered membership to spend twelve months in deliberation. But it was symptomatic of the lack of pressure to reach agreement that when the Bozzi Commission reported in January 1985 there were six separate minority reports dissenting in whole or in part from the conclusions, written by the six groups representing non-governmental parties, including a substantial minority report by the Communist group, which criticised the majority report for concentrating exclusively on the rapidity and certainty of decision-making in Parliament.⁶ Even within the majority report there was a wide variety of proposals added by individual members and small groups, including nine different reforms of the electoral system. There was finally a degree of agreement over electoral reform favouring the introduction of a system rather similar to the West German, but the Commission report was unable to do more than pass this on to Parliament as worthy of further debate. Despite this effort, typical ofthe style of Parliamentary proposals, to include the entire range of available opinion, there were obvious disagreements of principle, limited but sharp. In the event, the Bozzi Commission split into two separate positions, not three, since the DC adopted without undue resistance a view representing an uneven compromise with the radical Right. The majority view of the Commission emphasised the need to concentrate power in the hands of the executive by increasing the authority of the Prime Minister within the Cabinet, and by giving the government greater control over the Parliamentary timetable and procedures. This had the support of all the governing parties, including the Socialists. It would not be unduly cynical to argue that this apparent unity among the governing parties was strongly conditioned by scepticism about the capacity of any government to make such reforms work under existing constitutional and political arrangements. The majority report of the Bozzi Commission stands as an example of the verbal activism and hollow intentions of Italy's governing elites. But also it indicated the success of Italy's industrial and financial managers in supplanting the Catholic populist rhetoric of the DC with a more radical free-market vision, not yet however translated into political practice.

The failure of the Bozzi Commission was followed by a shift of emphasis from institutional reform to full-blooded constitutional reform, concentrating on the balance of power between Head of State, Prime Minister and Parliament. This was rendered more urgent by the increasing strength of radical separatist parties in the wealthy regions of the North and by the unprecedented activist inclinations of the Head of State, Francesco Cossiga (1985–1992). After the 1992 elections, the success of the separatist groups known as the Leagues destroyed the fragile consensus on institutional reform without however providing an alternative. These developments are discussed in more detail in the final chapter.

The alternative to this was represented by the PCI (the Italian Communist Party) and the Independent Left, with support on particular issues from the Radicals and the far Left group Proletarian Democracy. In 1991, the Communists and the Independent Left became the PDS (Democratic Party of the Left), while the other groups splintered into new and unstable formations. The Left emerged from this metamorphosis significantly weaker in electoral support and political authority. For the Left the institutional problem is not stability or efficiency but defective representation, of which Parliamentary recalcitrance and governmental instability are merely symptoms. Gianfranco Pasquino, a political scientist at the University of Bologna and from 1983 to 1992 a Senator for the Independent Left, has argued consistently over a long period that the problem is the incapacity of the system to accomodate change, particularly societal change.⁷ This perspective emphasises the entrenched nature of the party hegemony, and suggests that the result of the permanence in office of one party is to weaken the institutions, to keep decision-making informal yet stable, and to ensure that pressure groups, associations, organised interests of whatever sort in civil society only achieve influence in so far as their activities are mediated through the political parties.

A sub-theme in this argument is the failure of the parties to represent the range of interests and opinions in society. For the immediate post-war period this means the interests associated with the Left and particularly with the Communists. After 1968 the groups most clearly excluded were firstly the new social movements which emerged out of the upheavals of the period, such as the civil liberties groups, grassroots trade union organisations, and unemployed workers groups, and then regional and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and maps
• List of tables
• Series editor's preface
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: issues and explanations in Italian policy
• Part I The policy framework
• Part II The practice of policy
• Select bibliography
• Index