Democracy at stake

Governmental instability, though a persistent feature of Italian politics, cannot be interpreted as an indicator that there always was a crisis of democracy in Italy. Very often there were, and there are, problems of functioning: crises within democracy. This article argues that Italian parties have been responsible for the appearance, the existence, and the evolution of Italian democracy. The collapse of the party system and the disappearance of all major parties between 1992 and 1994 have strongly and negatively affected the working of Italian democracy. The electoral system has been twice reformed with very poor results. There is an on-going institutional transition that is the cause and consequence of an impressive reallocation of political and institutional powers among all-important institutions: the Presidency of the Republic, the government, Parliament, and the judicial system mainly, the Constitutional Court. Unless Italian parties restructure themselves and a decent bipolar competition redefines the party system, the functioning of Italian democracy will be "at stake" and its quality will remain unsatisfactory

Memory, political culture and institutional change : a comparative perspective

The scope of my project is ambitious, probably excessively so. I would like to identify those elements of memory that impinge upon the political culture both of the elites and of the citizens and exercise an impact on (the construction of) the institutions. Memories of past political occurrences which according to the interpretation by specific and significant social groups (and/or influential elites) are defined extremely important and dramatic significantly contribute to the shaping of political culture, opening and/or foreclosing alternative paths to change. My initial hypothesis is those interpretations are especially significant when they refer to dramatic events whose recurrence must be prevented. In a way, they may be structured as warning memories or negative memories. My intervening hypothesis is that, when there are several carriers of different memories who try to affect institutional change, it is more likely that the winners will be those who promise change, perhaps, a limited amount of change, with respect to the past. My concluding hypothesis is that, nevertheless, even defeated memories will maintain a presence in the political culture at large or of some specific groups, provided they are enshrined in a political organization

Chapter 1 The three faces of accountability

Accountability is not an event, but a process. The purpose of the present chapter is to discuss the three faces or phases of accountability: taking into account, keeping into account and giving an account. In doing so attention is paid to the fact that parties and candidates in the course of one election need to learn and take into account what voters want, that their activities as elected official need to reflect the voters’ demands and that they need to go back to the voters to explain what they did when they were in office

Italy’s constitutional reform is ill conceived and can safely be rejected

Italy will hold a referendum on constitutional reform before the end of the year, with the country’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, indicating that he will resign if the referendum fails. Gianfranco Pasquino and Andrea Capussela provide a comprehensive assessment of the proposed reforms, arguing that they would be unlikely to meaningfully improve Italian governance and could reduce levels of political accountability

After Italy's vote: the case for a deal between the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement

Italy's election produced a fragmented result and there has been intense speculation over the potential government that could emerge from negotiations. Andrea Lorenzo Capussela and Gianfranco Pasquino argue that in a tri-polar parliament dominated by populists of different descriptions, a cabinet centred on some form of understanding between the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement would be the least bad option from the perspective of both Italy’s and Europe’s interests. At the very least, the logic of parliamentary democracy requires the two parties to engage in serious talks

La ciencia política en un mundo en transformación.

Conferencia pronunciada el 29 de julio de 2011 con motivo del otorgamiento del Doctorado Honoris Causa por la Universidad Católica de Córdoba, en el marco del X Congreso Nacional de Ciencia Política

Political philosophy and political science: complex relationships

The relationships between political philosophy and political science are complex, important, changing. They are also quite unsatisfactory. Following a brief analysis of four types of political philosophy, this article argues that the branch of political philosophy interested in describing and shaping a just society is highly relevant for what several political scientists study and write. When dealing with democracy and the processes of democratization, with the quality and the transformation of democratic political systems, political scientists can and should find a lot of interesting and useful material produced by political philosophers. Liberal democracies have won the Cold War. Now the challenge is represented by, on one side (religious), fundamentalisms (in the plural); on the other side, by the communitarians and the multiculturalists. Both groups of political philosophers declare that political liberalism, especially, the brand espoused and formulated by John Rawls, is inadequate to provide a framework for contemporary democratic regimes. This article claims that political scientists have a lot to learn from the clash of these political theories as well as from republicanism and constitutional patriotism. In this article, some indications are given and few examples are provided. So far the challenge has been eschewed and the task has gone unfulfilled

Social Networks, Political Discussion and Voting in Italy: A Study of the 2006 Election

This article analyzes the role of interpersonal discussion networks and television as the key mediators of political information that can potentially drive citizens’ electoral choices. The research relies on survey data of Italian voters in the aftermath of the 2006 general election. Findings show that the partisan intensity of discussion networks significantly affects the vote, so that citizens embedded in homogeneous partisan networks are more influenced than those who discuss politics within heterogeneous networks that do not uniformly support a unified political position. The effects of television news programs and talk shows turn out to be comparatively smaller than those of interpersonal networks, but are still significant for those programs and formats that attract politically diverse audiences. We interpret this result as a consequence of the increasing relevance of selective exposure in the Italian electorate, which has largely been documented by previous research. Thus, while the effects of interpersonal discussion networks seem to depend on the degree of their partisan intensity, the impact of television seems to be enhanced, in the Italian context, by a program’s ability to present itself as less openly biased than most of the competitors, thus failing to elicit selective exposure by the viewers. The main implication of this study is that interpersonal communication has a remarkable influence on citizens’ choices, and it should be studied together with mass communication, as they both constitute crucial components of voters’ information environments, although their effects depend on partially different factors

Italian politics in an era of recession : the end of bipolarism?

Italian politics have undergone momentous change in the 2007–2017 decade under the impact of the eurozone crisis, whose peak in 2011–2013 could be equated to the earlier watershed years of 1992–1994. The lasting impact of the upheaval in Italian politics in the early 1990s could still be felt in the decade of economic recession, but there were also new challenges prompted by a crisis that had its roots in international financial contagion and which unravelled under the shadow of both recession and austerity. The changes were of an economic, social, cultural, institutional, policy-oriented and political nature. If one central quintessentially political theme stands out by the end of this decade it is the apparent exhaustion of the quest for bipolarisation that was initiated in the early 1990s