Political education and electoral politics: Communists and Catholics as teachers of democracy in early post-war Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses electoral politics as a field of citizenship education in a post-fascist democracy. Considering the rivalry between Communists and Catholics in Cold War Italy, made famous by the novels of Don Camillo e Peppone, it asks how they competed for the education of voters by approaching them directly through the media and face-to-face communication. It thereby dissects the different notions of democracy that informed their practices, while simultaneously emphasizing the commonalities which emerged from mutual observation and communication between these two ostensibly isolated ‘subcultures’. This look at pedagogical endeavours during election campaigns, which also targeted their own members, reveals how these two camps defined and spread the norms and values that shaped a vital civil society in post-fascist Italy. Driven by a shared sense of mission as moral agents of a new democratic order, Communists and Catholics through their competition established ‘democratic’ values and rules of conduct among their voters. The article also considers the difficulties that arose from this specific relationship between parties and voters as teachers and pupils of democracy.