Interest Representation, Party Systems, and the State: Italy in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

On the political wane elsewhere, Socialist-led governments rule all of southern Europe today. Economic conditions present the stickiest test for them. If they are to maintain power, they must find ways of selling their relatively unpalatable economic policies to both labor and business. Negotiating the competing claims of capitalism and democracy, these governments are looking for institutional mechanisms with which to bind functional organized interests to the state, thus allowing some measure of political control of the economy. If and how they succeed in doing so are the major questions for today's southern European political economies. Europe's classic postwar political geography was arranged around ruling social democracy in the North and delegitimated Socialist and Communist parties in a uniformly conservative South. The contemporary inversion of Europe's political map poses the question whether newly ruling left-wing parties in the South will follow the path laid down by their colleagues, a path marked out by Keynesian demand management policies, extensive welfare states, and corporatist policymaking networks. Or will Mediterranean socialism emerge as a third way of governing? This essay argues that it will follow the latter path, although in ways and for reasons which may be less than obvious. It makes general claims about the types of relations among the state, the party system, and organized functional interests that may be expected to develop in Europe's Socialist-led southern tier and then uses the analysis to illuminate a decade of Italian political economy. Because Italy is the country for which northern expectations have been repeatedly expressed, it offers an especially strong case for demonstrating the weaknesses of reading the Europe social democratic model into the South.