Interest groups and political parties in Italian agricultural policy: powerful farmers with and without parties

Abstract

This article is about the transformation of party–group relationships in Italian agricultural policy. The political context and the policy dynamics have given rise to varying relations between farmers’ organisations and parties at different points of Italian political history. The close link between the largest organisations (Coldiretti and Confagricoltura) and the Christian Democratic Party initially structured party–group relationships; the supremacy of the former was a central feature of the wider system of relations among parties, groups and other policymaking actors. These relations lasted a long time, but the effective dynamics changed. Increasingly, the governing parties gave less attention to agricultural issues: farmers’ groups and the ministry of agriculture could be left to develop policy, and this situation was consolidated, thanks to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) from the 1960s. The institutionalisation of a distributive policy paradigm, both at the national and at the European levels, strengthened farmer organisations and other agricultural interest groups later on. Following the Italian political crisis of the early 1990s and CAP reform in the 1990s and 2000s, the political and policy contexts changed substantially: the main political parties disappeared, but interest groups were able to maintain relations with governments of the day and to develop temporary links with different parties in the legislative arena, thus enabling them to play a central role in agricultural policymaking.