Italian Political Economy Research Articles

The social and political bases of political economy: interpreting and periodising Italian developments since WWII

ABSTRACT We investigate the transition between Fordism and neoliberalism in Italy employing insights from International (IPE) and Comparative Political Economy (CPE). Transitions are key periods to observe how countries tend to converge towards similar political economy developments through processes of social, political and institutional adaptation. We contribute to the literature by detailing how transformations in the ‘social and political bases of political economy’ influence institutional change. We understand these transformations as movements from below (changes in sociodemographic and productive compositions, and social movements) and above (agency in political parties, trade unions, business associations and elites); we name these components ‘the social and productive composition’ and ‘the social and political representation sphere’ respectively. Employing process tracing, we identify three historical periods in post-WWII Italian political economy – state Fordism (1945–78), a transitional period we name ‘the long 1980s’ (1979–91), and neoliberalism (1992–) – delineated by two historical ruptures: a breakup moment in 1978–9 that signalled the decline of Fordism, and a critical juncture that ushered in neoliberalism in 1992. Analytically, changes within the social and productive composition during state Fordism impacted on the social and political representation sphere, and on several reforms undertaken in different institutional domains. However, since the breakup moment 1978–9 this dynamic changed together with the international political economy context. Similar to other western countries, the main actors within the social and political representation sphere increasingly approached institutional regulation inspired by neoliberal ideas, while the pressures coming from the more active forces within the social and productive composition faltered.

Between export-led growth and administrative Keynesianism: Italy’s two-tiered growth regime

ABSTRACT Comparative political economy scholarship struggles to categorise Italy’s model of capitalism between a mixed-market economy and a hybrid, stagnant economic system. To enhance our understanding of the Italian political economy, this article employs the analytical framework of growth regimes to study Italy’s regional economic systems. Our analysis indicates that Italy can hardly be defined as a ‘national growth regime’ due to the presence of two diametrically opposed regional growth regimes: Northern regions conform to a manufacturing-based, export-led growth regime supported by competitiveness-enhancing territorial institutions; southern regions conform to a particular variety of the consumption-led growth regime, that is, an administrative Keynesianism regime, which we theorise to typify a regime where growth and employment are systematically dependent on the state’s role of employer of last resort, the state’s consumption-enhancing social policies and economic forbearance of labour and corporate tax regulations. The article suggests that studying regional growth regimes is desirable when marked internal diversity in economic outcomes or productive structures exists across regions within (generally larger) countries, and when subnational governments have powers to develop major own institutions/policies in support of regional growth regimes.

Constrained economic policy in Italy’s dual-hybrid economy

ABSTRACT This article examines recent developments in Italy’s economic and fiscal policymaking. It does so by contextualising the 2023 changes in the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) within three broader aspects which have characterised the Italian political economy: (1) the country’s conservative fiscal trajectory inside the monetary union (EMU); (2) the expansionary economic policies pursued in the face of both the pandemic and energy crises; (3) the peculiar characteristics of Italy’s ‘dual-hybrid economy’. The article posits that, since the EMU, Italy has continuously run primary budget surpluses higher than its EMU peers. Only since Covid-19, and with the relaxation of EMU constraints, has Italy’s fiscal stance turned expansionary. This has allowed space for various socioeconomic policies to partially shield households and firms from the crises’ fallout. However, with a return to fiscal conservatism, the NRRP now represents the only game in town to try and address Italy’s dual hybridity characterised by weak state capacity and supply-side institutional inconsistencies as well as two diametrically opposed regional growth regimes in the North and the South.

The rise of anti-establishment and far-right forces in Italy: Neoliberalisation in a new guise?

Over the last decade, the succession of financial crisis, neoliberal reform processes, and emergence of anti-establishment and far-right political forces has become a familiar pattern across Europe. But in few countries has it been as striking as in Italy. After the 2018 national elections, the anti-establishment Five-Star Movement (M5S) and the far-right League joined forces to form a government characterised by its rejection of past neoliberalising reforms and by its defiant stance towards European Union fiscal rules. The League’s victory in the latest European elections confirmed its ascendance and its centrality in the Italian political landscape. This article examines these developments in light of the recent trajectory of the Italian political economy and investigates whether the rise of these parties, and particularly the League, marked a break with the post-2011 neoliberalisation process. Analysis of the M5S-League government’s action indicates that these forces can further neoliberalisation processes together with a mix of anti-migration and welfare chauvinist measures. Moreover, an investigation of the political-economic project of the League shows that far-right parties can advance ‘nation-based’ neoliberalisation processes.

Economic imaginaries and beyond. A cultural political economy perspective on the League party

ABSTRACT In the face of enduring crisis phenomena, quantitative evidence of the renewed salience of socio-economic agendas advanced by radical right populist parties calls for more qualitative research work and in-depth case studies. The present paper aims to contribute to filling this gap through a cultural political economy (CPE) investigation of the Italian League (Lega) party that foregrounds its socio-economic positioning by reconstructing the party’s ‘economic imaginary’. The suggested synergy between CPE and a critical discourse analysis of the League’s practical argumentation in the 2013 and 2018 electoral manifestos points to a composite economic imaginary that prioritizes: 1) production (vs financialization); 2) support of internal demand; 3) lowering of fiscal pressure; 4) protectionism and 5) welfare. The analysis shows how, under Salvini’s leadership, the party’s practical argumentation in EU matters has become constitutive of its overall political strategy and so exacerbated the claims at the core of the respective economic imaginary. In this vein, the League’s Euroscepticism has also polarized the relationship between the party’s socio-economic and socio-cultural stance, thus urging to go beyond the focus on economic imaginaries and sketch out a CPE research agenda on the League’s more encompassing struggle for hegemony in the Italian political economy.

Agent-Based Macroeconomics and Classical Political Economy: Some Italian Roots

In this work, we discuss how the rich academic milieu left by different Italian political economy traditions after WWII paved the way for the development of a new generation of macroeconomic agent-based models. The K + S (Dosi et al. in J Econ Dyn Control 34:1748–1767, 2010; Dosi et al. in J Evol Econ. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-016-0466-4 , 2016a), CATS (Delli Gatti et al. in J Econ Behav Organ 56:489–512, 2005; Delli Gatti et al. in Macroeconomics from the bottom-up. Springer, Berlin, 2011) and EURACE (Cincotti et al. in Econ Open Access Open Assess E J 4, 2010; Teglio et al. in Adv Complex Syst 15:1–27, 2012) families of agent-based models are at the frontier of an alternative macroeconomic research paradigm, which considers the economy as a complex evolving system. The three families of models are presented in detail and their empirical performance and policy exercises discussed.

Can Italy Keep Up to Europe?

The process of European integration is at a turning point. Recent discussions about the future of monetary union seem to suggest that progress towards further deepening of the European Union may be in question and that more than one model of Europe may develop in the future. It is against this background that an answer to the question this article asks should be sought. To keep up with the next phase of European integration, Italy – like all the other members of the EU, both current and future – is asked to undertake relevant adjustment policies producing heavy costs in the short run in exchange for expected future benefits. While costs are clear, benefits are perceived as distant and often unclear. The state of uncertainty Europe is currently going through reflects deep-rooted problems. The strategy Europe chose to follow at the end of the past decade, captured in the “one market, one money” formula, has – so far at least – failed to deliver its promises, and this failure has disclosed two old weaknesses, a macroeconomic one and a competitive one, and produced a new weakness, one involving enlargement and cohesion. This article considers these three weaknesses and discusses Italy’s position with respect to each of them, in an attempt to single out the costs and benefits of its participation in the process of European integration. It then describes the evolution of the Italian political economy after the September 1992 crisis of the European Monetary System (EMS) and the adjustment process Italian governments have undertaken to face the deep financial crises that erupted. Finally, it looks at the current situation and considers the possibility of a “winning coalition” being established in the Italian political economy to proceed further towards convergence with Europe. It suggests that such a coalition would be like the one that has made it possible to undertake the severe adjustment following the 1992 crisis. It also argues that, in order for adjustment policies to be successful, in Italy and elsewhere, Europe must define its priorities and offer clear opportunities of growth and welfare to its citizens.

The Political Economy of Unmediated Democracy: Italian Austerity under Mario Monti

This article explores the political economy of reform under the technocratic government of Mario Monti. Unlike the technocratic governments of the 1990s, the Monti interregnum was an experiment in unmediated democracy, in which a government is actively supported neither by political parties nor by encompassing social groups. Italian political leaders adopted unmediated democracy because of the underlying interest group conflicts in the Italian political economy. Unmediated democrats such as Monti can impose bitter medicine on a stalemated society when it is in a stage of acute crisis, but the passage of longer-term reforms requires a social coalition to support those reforms beyond the critical stage of crisis. Thus the government implemented budget cuts, but liberalisation and institutional reform stalled in the face of opposition. Italy is unlikely to be durably reformed by a government that is not anchored to society through political parties or interest groups.

The political sources of Italy’s economic problems: Between opportunistic political leadership and pragmatic, technocratic leadership

The economic crisis beginning in 2008 brought into high relief problems in the Italian political economy that had been smoldering for a while. But these were exacerbated by a center-right government under the political leadership of Berlusconi that did little to stem the decline in economic competitiveness, the shrinking of domestic wealth, and the explosion of youth and female unemployment, let alone to confront the crisis head on through effective reform initiatives. When that government collapsed, a new government under the technocratic leadership of Professor Mario Monti came to the rescue. This replicates a pattern seen before, in which long stretches of opportunistic, ideologically divided and ineffective political economic leadership for time are followed by pragmatic technocratic leadership at critical junctures, which manages to overcome political institutional constraints to liberalize and modernize. In order to explain this back and forth pattern, the article combines a discursive institutionalist analysis of Italian political leaders' ideas and discursive interactions with a historical institutionalist analysis of Italy's formal political institutional arrangements. It also sets Italy's political economy in comparative perspective, as a ‘state-influenced’ market economy in which the state hinders more than it enhances political economic activity, by contrast with France and even Spain.

Neither Lausanne nor Cambridge: Pantaleoni and the missing boundary between economics and sociology

By the turn of the twentieth century, Lausanne and Cambridge were the centres of diffusion of two rival versions of marginalism. This paper focuses on the position of Maffeo Pantaleoni, a leading figure of the late nineteenth century ‘renaissance’ of Italian political economy, with respect to the eminent representatives of the two schools: Pareto and Marshall. Pantaleoni's position is examined with reference to the two main bones of contention between Pareto and Marshall, namely general as opposed to partial equilibrium, and pure as opposed to mixed economics.

Beyond the Myth of Woman: The Becoming-Transfeminist of (Post-)Marxism

Antonella Corsani is an Italian economist who teaches at the Universite de Paris I, Pantheon-Sorbonne. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Multitudes and one of the editors of the collective volumes Vers un capitalisme cognitif [Toward a Cognitive Capitalism] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001) and L’eta del capitalismo cognitivo [The Era of Cognitive Capitalism] (Verona: Ombre corte, 2002). As this essay demonstrates, her work focuses on the changing nature of labor in post-Fordist capitalism, particularly the phenomena of irregular or intermittent work, intellectual or immaterial labor, and the “feminization” of labor. Like many post-workerist thinkers, she takes a broadly global perspective on contemporary issues, combining French post-structuralist philosophy and feminism, Italian political economy, American ethnic and queer activism and post-colonial analysis, to construct a sophisticated theoretical paradigm for interpreting and intervening into current debates over subversive subjectivity and the organization of resistance to global capital. This essay, which reprises many of the themes and methods that emerge in Corsani’s essays for Multitudes, was written especially for this issue of SubStance. Timothy S. Murphy, translator

The dramaturgy of horizons: geographical scale in the ‘Reconstruction of Italy’ by the new Italian political parties, 1992–1995

The four major political parties in contemporary (1994–1995) Italy—Forza Italia, the Northern League, the Democratic Party of the Left, and the National Alliance—are brand new in name and ideology. Each of these parties has been constructing in its rhetoric and organization differing conceptions of the geographical scales—international, national, regional, local—in terms of how they understand ‘Italy’. The collapse of the old system of parties during 1992–1994 created an opening for a reorganization of parties more in line with recent trends towards a fragmented Italian political economy and society. The Italian case illustrates a more general point, that political parties must organize themselves and their ideologies through the ways they divide, order and organize space. There is an intrinsically geographical basis to the drama of organized politics even when all parties structure space in the same ways. This is only more obvious at times of dramatic political change when there are competing conceptions of how to organize potential constituencies and interests. Geography, therefore, is not ‘external’ to the operations of political parties, a Euclidean surface or stage upon which the drama of politics is played out. The drama of party politics is scripted in terms of the geographical horizons—national or otherwise—parties set for themselves.

Italy

The four major political parties in contemporary (1994–1995) Italy—Forza Italia, the Northern League, the Democratic Party of the Left, and the National Alliance—are brand new in name and ideology. Each of these parties has been constructing in its rhetoric and organization differing conceptions of the geographical scales—international, national, regional, local—in terms of how they understand ‘Italy’. The collapse of the old system of parties during 1992–1994 created an opening for a reorganization of parties more in line with recent trends towards a fragmented Italian political economy and society. The Italian case illustrates a more general point, that political parties must organize themselves and their ideologies through the ways they divide, order and organize space. There is an intrinsically geographical basis to the drama of organized politics even when all parties structure space in the same ways. This is only more obvious at times of dramatic political change when there are competing conceptions of how to organize potential constituencies and interests. Geography, therefore, is not ‘external’ to the operations of political parties, a Euclidean surface or stage upon which the drama of politics is played out. The drama of party politics is scripted in terms of the geographical horizons—national or otherwise—parties set for themselves.

Interest Representation, Party Systems, and the State: Italy in Comparative Perspective

On the political wane elsewhere, Socialist-led governments rule all of southern Europe today. Economic conditions present the stickiest test for them. If they are to maintain power, they must find ways of selling their relatively unpalatable economic policies to both labor and business. Negotiating the competing claims of capitalism and democracy, these governments are looking for institutional mechanisms with which to bind functional organized interests to the state, thus allowing some measure of political control of the economy. If and how they succeed in doing so are the major questions for today's southern European political economies. Europe's classic postwar political geography was arranged around ruling social democracy in the North and delegitimated Socialist and Communist parties in a uniformly conservative South. The contemporary inversion of Europe's political map poses the question whether newly ruling left-wing parties in the South will follow the path laid down by their colleagues, a path marked out by Keynesian demand management policies, extensive welfare states, and corporatist policymaking networks. Or will Mediterranean socialism emerge as a third way of governing? This essay argues that it will follow the latter path, although in ways and for reasons which may be less than obvious. It makes general claims about the types of relations among the state, the party system, and organized functional interests that may be expected to develop in Europe's Socialist-led southern tier and then uses the analysis to illuminate a decade of Italian political economy. Because Italy is the country for which northern expectations have been repeatedly expressed, it offers an especially strong case for demonstrating the weaknesses of reading the Europe social democratic model into the South.