The Italian case of a transition within democracy

Abstract

Notwithstanding the vast literature available, there is no consensus on the interpretation of both the crisis of the Italian party system in the first half of the 1990s and the political events that followed it, events that brought about an alternation in government between two opposing coalitions between 1996 and 2001 and 2006. Indeed, there is such a level of uncertainty over how to interpret the last 15 years that it remains difficult even to give a name to the various phases Italian democracy has undergone. While some refer to the post-war period as a ‘first republic’ and the years following the crisis of the 1990s as a ‘second republic’ without specifying when the passage from one to the other occurred, others maintain that the second republic never happened, and still others contend that, following the success of Berlusconi in 2001, Italy entered directly into a ‘third republic’. This confusion is due to the difficulty in conceptualising political change in an established democracy such as Italy. It is my contention that the Italian ‘crisis’ of the first half of the 1990s has to be considered as a crisis of the formal and informal institutional rules aroundwhich Italian democracy was organised in the post-war era and that that the process which followed has to be understood in the context of the old and new institutional constraints within which it developed. If political change may follow different routes in accordance with contingency factors or specific power relations among the main political actors, that change is inevitably to be bound by the institutional structure within which it takes place. An institutional crisis may be solved through a redefinition of the rules of the game. Such redefinition may take the form of new rules (institutional transformation) or of functional adaptation of the old ones to the new needs (institutional re-ordering). If a transition concerns the search for these rules, then Italian democracy can be said to be still in a state of transition. Italy has moved away from the equilibrium of the post-war period, although a new agreed equilibrium has not yet taken its place. Although the very concept of ‘transition’ has to be treated with care, in that it might imply a teleological perspective on political change which is misleading, it may become an effective analytical tool if used in a larger comparative framework, one concerning models of democracy. The aims of this paper are both to explain the post-1992 Italian political change in the context of models of democracy and to conceptualise it on the basis of the historical and theoretical literature.