Introduction – Italy: A contested polity

Abstract

Ten years after the last special issue of West European Politics dedicated to Italian politics, it is possible to extend and refine the framework used in that issue to document and explain the trajectory of change in Italian politics since the early 1990s. After the crisis at the beginning of that decade, the long period that has followed has been characterised by a process of negotiated change and ‘institutional layering’ which, thus far, has produced an outcome that is far from the expectations generated 15 years ago. The pattern of limited change, moreover, looks set to continue into the foreseeable future.