A biased pendulum

Abstract

This chapter reconstructs how relationships between successive governments and the main social partner organizations have evolved in Italy in the decade from the onset of the Great Recession in 2008 to the new phase in Italian politics, originated by the general elections of 2018. We show that although the heyday of concertation in Italy has long passed, unilateralism is not a new permanent feature of Italian policymaking. Rather, throughout the period 2008–2018, Italy experienced an ongoing oscillation between unilateralism and more negotiated policymaking. During the economic crisis, successive governments of both centre-left technocratic and centre-right orientation repeatedly sought to eschew public negotiations with unions and employers’ organizations, due to the negative policy legacies of concertation and the declining legitimacy of social partners in public opinion. However, governmental unilateralism and attempts at disintermediation encountered limits in the embeddedness of social partners’ power resources in specific policy areas and in political instability resulting in government weakness. These factors occasionally induced cabinets to recur to informal practices of consultation and political exchange with the social partners behind closed doors, to extract their consent to reforms and smoothen policy implementation. The puzzling resilience of occasional political exchange throughout the crisis decade suggests that the role of organized interests in shaping the trajectory of political institutional change in Italy is not yet completely exhausted.