Government and Politics of Italy

Robert Leonardi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780333415818
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350311398
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The political history of Italy has been an undeniably turbulent one. The country's political system has been repeatedly threatened by the historical existence of extremist parties on the left and right, an economy which struggles to adapt, the cleavage between a developed north and an underdeveloped south, the challenge posed by terrorist groups and organized crime, high public debt, and governments that last on average only ten months. Paradoxically, however, Italy continues to muddle through from one political crisis to another with one of the world's highest standards of living and quality of life. What is the secret of Italian politics?

© The Author(s) 2017

Robert LeonardiGovernment and Politics of ItalyComparative Government and Politicshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-93231-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Nexus between Socio-Economic and Political Change in Italy: Why Does Italy Matter?

Robert Leonardi¹

(1)

LUISS University, Department of Political Science LUISS University, Rome, Italy

Robert Leonardi

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Why the Government and Politics of Italy Are Important

The study of Italian politics has a long pedigree among American and European scholars given the country’s history and economic and political turbulence over the past two centuries. After the Second World War scholars were attracted to the politics of the country due to the existence of Western Europe’s largest Communist Party (PCI), which had significant roots in different social classes (farm workers, industrial blue collar workers, white collar workers, members of cooperatives, storekeepers, entrepreneurs and intellectuals) and pursued a basically democratic rather than revolutionary strategy for coming to power through the electoral process. Based on its large membership base, it governed a number of local, provincial and regional governments with reasonable success in the production of common goods for the public and was recognized as a party capable of incorporating the principles of good government in terms of policy making and administration. But the politics of the country also fascinated scholars due to the existence of the Vatican and a dominant Christian Democratic Party that exercised a monopoly of power at the national level and was able to impose Catholic cultural values and practices on the general public through national legislation on divorce, abortion, differentiation of rights between men and women, and censorship of the national media. In between these two large mass parties, the country witnessed the existence of many other different political movements that waxed and waned on the basis of internal as well as external political events. The gamut ran from the neo-fascists (MSI) to the Liberals (PLI), Social Democrats (PSDI) and Republicans (PRI) within the central part of the political spectrum. The Italian political system also had more extremist parties on the far left (e.g., Marxist-Leninist) and on the far right (e.g., New Order, Casa Pound) agitating for a military coup and the imposition of an authoritarian regime and corporatist state.

Interest in Italian politics was also stimulated by the geographic position of the country. During its first 40 years of existence after the end of the Second World War, Italy represented for many the “soft political underbelly” of the European continent that was flanked by military dictatorships towards the west (Portugal and Spain) and towards the east by either other military dictatorships (Greece) or Communist regimes (Yugoslavia and Albania). Given the persistent political instability of the national governments (a turnover of governments on a yearly basis) and the exasperated multi-party system, the country seemed to be constantly on the brink of political collapse. In fact, the model that was usually applied by scholars to phantom the developments in the Italian party system was the theoretical construct formulated by Giovanni Sartori of “polarized pluralism” (1976) predicting that the country would eventually wind up as a post-Second World War copy of the Weimar Republic or Allende’s Chile. However, despite its apparent shortcomings the country’s political system continued to muddle through each political crisis that surfaced during the 1960s and 1970s and was ultimately successful in beating back both right-wing as well as left-wing terrorism without militarizing the society or the judicial system. For many observers Italy continued to inexplicably resist going over the political precipice but just barely. Instead, the country’s political system was able to transform the recurrent political crises into subtle political changes that were slowly transforming the nature of political interactions among the various political parties and strengthening the outputs of public policy.

Italy’s party system in the post-war period was a dualistic system that was split between parties that could assume the responsibility for governing the country and those that could not. The differentiation in political prospects was referred to by Giorgio Galli (1978) as the “imperfect two party system”. In the former category of those who could assume governmental power were located the Christian Democratic Party along with its centrist allies (Republicans, Social Democrats and Liberals), and in 1964 that category was expanded to the Socialist Party. In the latter group one could find the Communist Party and the Italian Social Movement (MSI). The PCI was excluded due to its ties to the Soviet Union while the MSI was excluded because it had never fully reconciled its party programme with the democratic principles contained in the 1948 Italian Constitution. For the MSI, parliament should not be directly elected by the people but rather should represent the various sectoral groups or corporations that composed civil society. Therefore, the results of parliamentary elections were almost always a foregone conclusion: the Christian Democrats would emerge as the strongest party and would continue to rule with their centrist, and later, with their Socialist allies while the PCI and the MSI would continue to represent the opposition. In this manner the largest party of the left, the PCI, never had the opportunity to emerge as the governing party. If this had been a possibility, there was the strong expectation that the army would have stepped in to put an end to this turn of events and, finally, to the existence of a democratic political system. In reality the Christian Democrats never lost their relative majority role and when the Communists closed in on the level of the Christian Democratic vote, they proposed in 1976 the creation of a grand coalition to combine the forces of the two largest parties in a governmental alliance. This proposal was labelled the Historic Compromise.

While the political system seemed to resist change, this was not the case in the economy. Italy’s economic system, once dominated by the agricultural sector, was quickly converted during the 1950s into an industrial economy, and it continued to survive and even prosper in increasingly competitive European and international markets. Even more surprising was the appearance of a new, diffused form of industrialization based on small and medium-sized enterprises that cropped up in the central and northeast parts of the country in the form of “industrial districts” (Bagnasco, 1977; Piore and Sabel, 1984) while at the same time in other Western European countries deindustrialization had become the dominant industrial trend. An Italian form of deindustrialization also appeared among the large corporations, especially the public ones, operating in Italy’s former “industrial triangle” located in the northwest part of the country, but the negative economic effects of deindustrialization were minimized in the Italian case by the new industrialization process that had cropped up in other parts of the country. Eventually, the industrial districts also made their appearance in the former industrial triangle.

At the same time that these changes in industry were taking place, the country underwent a swift and profound change in social mores. Italy witnessed the introduction of legislation on divorce in 1970 and on abortion in 1981 and these were subsequently sanctioned by popular referenda. Such changes were previously unheard of in traditional Catholic societies and were even less expected in a political system where the Catholic Church exercised a daily presence and was represented by the dominant political party. Despite the institutionalized power of the Catholic party and the position of the Church, lay social values that were reflected in Italian cinema classics such as La Dolce Vita succeeded in changing the social values of a majority of the population. During the 1970s and 1980s these lay social values triumphed over the conservative and even reactionary religious values that had long dominated civil society in the northern as well as southern parts of the country.

The thesis of this volume is that the changes in social values reflected in the reinforcement of individual civil rights that took place after 1970 reflected the solid social mobility and economic changes that continue to characterize Italian society. The stimulation of social mobility in Italy can be traced to the changes in the economic base, the mass migration of southerners to the north and the expansion of the educational system to cover increasingly large strata of young people between the ages of 11 and 16. Thus, during the 1960s and 1970s the population became better educated, was geographically more mobile and had employment prospects radically different than was the case with previous generations.

Finally, Italy is worth studying due to its important role in building the foundations for European integration. Italy is the home of European federalist thought through the contribution of thinkers such as Altiero Spinelli and others who laid the theoretical foundations for a united Europe and who during the early years of the European Coal and Steel Community and Common Market participated in the building and consolidation of European institutions. Part of the reason for its openness to Europe is that Italian culture has always strived towards a universalistic vision rather than a national or local one. This is also the vision of the Catholic Church, which under the present Pope—but also before him—continues to address universal themes and speaks to the world at large rather than to the immediately surrounding Italian society. Secondly, Italy has always had porous physical as well as cultural borders. It has been invaded and parts of its territory has been ruled by other European powers, but in the process it has absorbed influences and ideas from multiple sources that have enriched its culture and contributed to a more European-wide and less nationalistic view of its political prospects. Therefore, an understanding of Italian politics and governmental institutions helps to better understand what the building blocks of a transformed Europe are.

This volume will analyse the nature of government and politics in Italy in order to understand why politics matter and how institutions are in a position to influence the development of civil society and economic change. The analysis will be conducted with an eye on other countries and developments in Europe as a whole in terms of comparisons of what is similar while at the same time highlighting the contrasts that make Italy a fascinating political system. Only in this way is it possible to fully understand the politics of Italy and how its institutions and leaders have influenced developments at the European level.

This chapter will provide the overall context for understanding the political system of Italy and how that system has changed over the years in response to challenges proposed by endogenous developments as well as exogenous ones. The fundamental thesis here is that Italian political institutions have had a leading role in institutionalizing the changes placed into motion by economic and social pressures. In other words, the Italian institutional system has been able to process demands for political, social and economic change originating in civil society, the economy and contending political forces. The Italian executive branch has never been able to exercise a monopolistic role in legislative proposals, nor has it been in a position to dictate the political agenda in a complete manner. However, it has been able to work with the legislative branch to produce the reforms required to modernize the country and to take advantage of integrating markets at the European and international levels.

These responses to requests for legislative changes have been possible due to the fact that Italian political institutions have, from the very beginning, attempted to be inclusive in nature through the initial adoption of proportional representation characterized by extremely low barriers for entry that made it almost impossible for any political force that had at least 1% of the national vote to be excluded from representation in Parliament. It will be argued that at the beginning the Italian political system emphasized what has been referred to in the literature as “input” legitimacy (Scharpf, 1999; Lijpart, 1999)—i.e., maximizing the capacity to represent political differences in society—but later on during the 1970s it added the “output” side of legitimacy—i.e., being able to solve societal demands—through governmental legislation and action.

This switch was made possible due to the fact that the centre of the political system was focused on the representative and not the executive branch of government. This led to the creation of an institutional relationship where the representative branch has remained strong while the executive branch has been relatively weak, and it is the executive branch that constantly has to rely on the reconfirmation of its political base in Parliament and is forced to constantly change its leaders and coalition in order to remain in power. Italian executives have always ruled on the basis of party coalitions. No one party has ever had an absolute majority. Even after the 1948 election when Christian Democracy did capture a simple majority of seats in one branch of Parliament, it decided to govern on the basis of a four-party coalition rather than attempting to rule the country by itself.

On the other hand, parliamentary elections have mainly followed their natural course of taking place once the political mandates have been completed. Italian parliamentary rules even allow legislation to be passed by votes in standing committees rather than being always brought out on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies or the Senate. The manner in which legislation is approved depends on decisions taken by representatives of the parliamentary groups along with the president of each chamber and of the government. In Italy private member bills are common, and they are not blocked by pre-emptive executive action. Thus, the broad nature of representation in Italy and the openness of legislative initiatives and decision making make it possible for forces from civil society to get their message through to the political institutions and thus reconfirm the open nature of the Italian political system.

Italy as a Case Study for Developing Countries and Democratization

In 1961 Maurice Neufeld published a book entitled Italy, School for Awakening Countries in which he argued that the Italian labour movement, despite its political divisions into three ideological groups, i.e., Communist, Socialist and Catholic, had served to integrate large strata of the working population into organized trade unionism and into production and consumer cooperatives, thereby succeeding in successfully mobilizing the working population into organized collective action groups capable of impacting political institutions. The type of collective action promoted by the trade unions was, first of all, in the defence of the working standards and salaries of the working class but also as a bulwark against authoritarian movements of the right as well as the revolutionary movements of the left.

Support for Neufeld’s thesis was provided by developments in the 1960s and 1970s when the trade union movement proved fundamental in rejecting the attempts by conservative forces in the Christian Democratic Party to bring the neo-fascist MSI into government as well as in denying a social base for the attempted coup in 1964 by reactionary military and industrial interests. The same stabilizing effect on the part of the trade union movement took place on the heels of the 1968–1969 student and workers mobilization that was channelled into the formal recognition of the role of the trade unions and the workers movement in supporting changes in industrial relations and social policies and in opening up the national governmental process to the institutionalized parties of the left. Therefore, what was important from Neufeld’s perspective of the Italian trade union movement was not its nominal political affiliation—Communist or Socialist—but the policies it supported and what it did in channelling the workers movement into participation in the democratic political process. The validity of his thesis was later to be verified by the course of the democratization process in Spain and Portugal where the trade union movements were fundamental in pushing the political system towards open parliamentary democracies and competitive party systems and in helping to resist any attempt to push these two countries back into an authoritarian mould.

The democratization process in Eastern Europe brought together a slightly different mix of socio-economic and political forces than was the case in the Iberian Peninsula. Important in the Eastern European context was the democratization impact of the social mobility that had been created by the Socialist regimes and the need to open national markets to external competition and investment. The dismantling of state monopolies and the positions of political privilege previously enjoyed by the leaders of the Communist party structure opened up society to further mobility but also to an increased diffusion of power among various elements of civil society.

The Italian case is also instructive in demonstrating the depolarizing effect on radical anti-system political parties of, in the first place, taking seats in Parliament and, secondly, assuming responsibility to govern (Leonardi, 1978). In Italy’s case during the immediate post-war period Communist and other Marxist parties in general assumed government responsibilities at the local and regional levels and eventually at the national level without placing into question the democratic nature of the political system. The 2017 Italian government headed by the Democratic Party (PD) evolved from the former Communist Party. The PCI was dissolved in 1991 in response to the disappearance of the Soviet Union (Andreucci, 2014) and subsequently went through different phases of evolution before it became a normal social democratic party in the European mould. In addition, the depolarization of the political system made it possible for the former Communist Party and parts of the Christian Democratic Party to come together in support of the bid by Romano Prodi for the office of Prime Minister in 1996 and eventually to create a single party, the PD, in 2007.

In the same manner the former neo-fascist party was brought into government by Silvio Berlusconi in 1994 and one year later transformed itself into the National Alliance Party (Alleanza Nazionale, AN). AN was present as a separate party in every government led by Silvio Berlusconi between 1995 and 2009 when it formally merged with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia to create the People of Freedom (PdL) alliance.

We have seen this process unfolding in Central and Eastern European countries and more recently in Greece w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. The Nexus between Socio-Economic and Political Change in Italy: Why Does Italy Matter?
• 2. The Impact of Economic Challenges on Italy’s Political System
• 3. Parliament: Democratization of Representative Institutions
• 4. The Executive Branch: Who Rules Italy?
• 5. The Judicial System: The Delivery of Justice under the Separation of Powers
• 6. The Electoral System and the Search for Political Advantage
• 7. The Political Party System
• 8. Organized Groups and Civil Society
• 9. Italy as an International Actor: Punching Above Its Weight?
• 10. Conclusions
• Backmatter