Interpreting the actions of the Meloni government

As regular readers of Contemporary Italian Politics will know, the second issue each year hosts the English-language version of the Italian edition in the well-known annual series, Politica in Italia. Produced in collaboration with the Istituto Cattaneo in Bologna and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Politica in Italia has been published, by Il Mulino, every year since 1986. It therefore provides a service not only to Italianists, but also to contemporary historians (by making available essays, on a wide range of Italian political and social topics, stretching back over nearly forty years) and to political scientists (by making available, in English as well as Italian, data and information for those seeking to include Italy in comparative studies). We are therefore extremely grateful to the editors, Federica Genovese and Salvatore Vassallo, and their contributors for producing what we think is another splendid edition. The sub-title of Politica in Italia – I fatti dell’anno e le interpretazioni – is, we think, significant. Interpretation is the act of explaining, reframing or otherwise showing one’s understanding of something. Interpretation therefore – we would argue – involves an inescapable subjective and thus normative element – an element that is present in political analyses in other ways besides. It is present in the choice of what to study, and what not to study. And, most significantly, it is present by virtue of the fact that the big difference between students of political and social life on the one hand, and students of the natural and physical world on the other, is that the pronouncements of the former constitute a part of the world they seek to study. They therefore inevitably have an impact on that world – they are, despite themselves, political in that sense – with the result that claims by social scientists that their work is politically neutral are inevitably false. It is important to emphasize this because there is, we think, too widespread a tendency among political scientists in general today to seek to avoid the implications of this by insisting on a detached style of writing: refusing, in the name of ‘objectivity’, to be explicit about their own normative commitments, believing that only such an approach to their work guarantees them the necessary scientific rigour. We disagree. Scientific rigour and intellectual honesty does not mean hiding from the reader one’s own value judgements. To refuse to be explicit about these is, we would argue, to be guilty of qualunquismo, by which we mean a refusal to accept one’s responsibility, as the member of a political community, to take a public stand on the issues of the day, hoping that they will pass her by, leaving her and her activity unaffected. And not infrequently, it results in texts that are dry and not at all fun to read. Only by avoiding this trap can we, as political scientists, live up to our responsibility to our students to provide them with the enthusiasm, as well as the intellectual tools and equipment, to enable and encourage them to be the good, politically engaged, citizens of tomorrow: a responsibility of no small significance in an age of democratic malaise and falling election turnouts. And only by avoiding this trap can we live up to the humanist CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN POLITICS 2023, VOL. 15, NO. 2, 121–123 https://doi.org/10.1080/23248823.2023.2199495