Political Change without Institutional Transformation: What Can We Learn from the Italian Crisis of the 1990s?

Abstract

Since 1991 Italy has witnessed the crisis of its post-war consensual model of democracy. While in other democratic countries consensualism has been justified by ethnic or linguistic or religious cleavages, in Italy it is ideological cleavage that has justified the politics of accommodation among the leaders of the main parties. Consequently, as in the other consensual democracies, postwar Italy was unable to experience the alternation in government between opposed political options. The formation of a power-sharing political system at the governmental level was supported by the institutionalization, at the level of policy-making structures, of a sort of oligarchic pluralism, through which a network of organized minorities (in the public administration and in the interest groups) ended up by controlling the huge resources of the Italian state. These institutional and policy-making structures conflicted with the requirements imposed by the process of European integration. Different social actors were activated to challenge the legitimacy of that power-sharing system. A political change followed, indicated by the collapse of the postwar party system. But given the timing and the nature of the crisis, and the ambiguity of the new electoral law introduced by the old parties before their final collapse, the new parties proved able to resist the pressure for institutional transformation, although they had to agree with important policy changes in order for Italy to meet the Maastricht criteria for adopting the new European common currency. But these policy changes continue to be jeopardized by the institutional inertia of the old governmental system.