Italy and America: politics and culture: Americanization of Italian politics?

Abstract

The product of modernization, influence and imitation, Americanization affects Italian politics in a variety of ways. There is no doubt that the newly proposed primaries do represent one way of transforming Italian politics and the idea of presidentialism has also been imported from the US experience. Less clear is how much the federalism promoted by the Northern League derives from a knowledge and understanding of US federalism. In several instances, it seems that Italian references to the US political system are made in order to give legitimacy to proposed reforms that respond to Italian problems and are often shaped by Italian preoccupations. Indeed, the most significant of the political changes connected with the Italian institutional transition, that is the emergence of an anti-political populist leader, Silvio Berlusconi, is more the product of a reaction against a recent political past and of Italian political culture than an imitation of US phenomena. In sum, if anything, Americanization manifests itself not in the shaping of Italian politics, but in a dialectical process, characterized by imitation, adaptation and reversals.