Italian Politics and Government

Abstract

As established in the 1948 Constitution, Italy is a parliamentary democracy in which in order to take office governments must be supported by a majority of voting members of parliament (MPs), separately both in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate, through a formal investiture vote. Both branches of Parliament are elected on a popular basis and have exactly the same prerogatives in the lawmaking process (symmetric bicameralism). The head of state is indirectly elected for a seven-year term. Although the constitutional framework established at the end of World War II remains substantially unchanged, common usage distinguishes two phases—called respectively First and Second Republic—to indicate the rupture marked by those changes in the electoral rules and the party system that occurred in the early 1990s. Throughout the phase known as First Republic (1948–1992), an open-list proportional PR system with large electoral constituencies underpinned a party system centered upon the Christian Democratic Party (DC) with “bilateral” opposition parties on the left (the Communist Party/PCI) and on the right (the postfascist Movimento Sociale Italiano/MSI). Such a political landscape was dramatically reshaped in early 1990s after a wave of judicial prosecutions against the political elites. From 1994 to 2013, following the introduction of a majoritarian mixed-member electoral system, the Italian party system was characterized by a bipolar pattern of party competition and alternating coalition governments on the center-right and the center-left of the political spectrum. Electoral rules were changed both in 2005 and in 2017, restoring a predominantly proportional system. The 2013 elections marked a turning point in Italian politics, witnessing the astonishing success of the Five Star Movement (M5S), a newcomer populist party which gained one-fourth of the popular vote. In the 2018 elections the challenger M5S confirmed its success becoming the largest parliamentary party and dictating the process of government formation.