Marco Valbruzzi

Non-partisan governments Italian-style: decision-making and accountability

Abstract Three non-partisan governments in less than 20 years, Italy reveals once more her deviance from European parliamentary democracies. This article explores the reasons why and how non partisan governments have been formed. It evaluates their contributions in terms of problem-solving and decision-making capabilities. It identifies their major democratic inconvenient in their almost total lack of accountability. Non-partisan governments are the consequence of the failure of political parties. The institutional circuit: ‘Parliament-Government-Presidency of the Republic’ has shown an unexpected resilience and flexibility. Hence, the reappearance and reassertion of ‘party government’ fully depends on the ability of Italian parties to reform themselves and to shape a new party system. Both tasks seem to be daunting for all of them caught in a serious leadership succession crisis and not organizationally consolidated. Nobody can tell what will occur when Mario Monti’s non-partisan government arrives at the end of his trajectory.

Italy says no: the 2016 constitutional referendum and its consequences

Abstract On 4 December 2016, Italians went to the polls to say yes or no in a popular referendum called by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on his package of constitutional reforms. Turnout was very high: 65.5 per cent. The No vote scored an impressive victory: 59.1 per cent rejected those reforms; 40.9 per cent supported them. This article puts those reforms in the context of previous attempts to modify several articles of the Italian constitution. The authors analyze and criticize the substance of those reforms and explain their possible impact on the functioning of the Italian political system. The Yes and No alignments were somewhat diversified, while the Yes vote got a lot of support from an often curious combination of domestic and foreign bedfellows interested in the political stability of Renzi’s government more than in any specific reform. Renzi’s defeat led to his resignation. A new government was immediately formed. It is unclear when and whether other, different constitutional reforms will be formulated. The Italian political and institutional transition continues while once again attention is focused on the electoral law and on how to restructure the parties and the party system.

Post-electoral politics in Italy: institutional problems and political perspectives

A dysfunctional electoral law and an obsolete bicameral Parliament contributed to the surprising results of the 24–25 February 2013 Italian elections, which have solved none of Italys institutional and political problems. This article briefly analyses the distribution of votes, stressing especially that the success of the Five Stars Movement derives from the dissatisfaction and the protest of a significant sector of the electorate. Beppe Grillo, like Silvio Berlusconi, is a political entrepreneur, who through patience, hard work and commitment has constructed an organization with a wide geographical following. The presence in Parliament of the Five Stars Movement made the election of the President of the Republic very difficult. President Napolitano was obliged to accept an unprecedented second term and then led the Democratic Party, the People of Freedom and Civic Choice to form an unusual government, almost a sort of Grand Coalition. The government is here briefly assessed. The article ends underlining two critical aspects of the situation. Neither the Italian parties nor the party system have succeeded in reaching a satisfactory level of consolidation and stability. This means that the President of the Republic has been obliged to make good the shortcomings of the political parties. Even malgré soi, the Presidents behaviour has given rise to a situation in which his own position raises the urgent need for institutional reforms along the lines of the semi-presidential mould of the French Fifth Republic to bring to a close Italys overlong political transition.

Is trasformismo a useful category for analysing modern Italian politics

The Italian vice, a historic stain, national character or simply a system of government? For many years and certainly since the founding of the Italian state, transformism/trasformismo has been one of the concepts most used and abused by scholars to describe the (mal)functioning of Italian political institutions and the low yields of its political system. This essay reconstructs the entire political and historical trajectory of transformism in Italy, from the coming to power of the liberal Left under Agostino Deprestis in the 1870s to the so-called Second Republic of today which, precisely because of its transformist tendencies, seems to be facing yet another new crisis of the ‘system’. But is the concept of transformism really applicable only to Italy, although this was certainly where it was first born, grew and was exported to the rest of the world? These questions are addressed in the concluding sections of the essay.

With or without parliamentary primaries? Some evidence from the Italian laboratory

ABSTRACT In the last 10 years, Italy has slowly and quite unexpectedly become the European home of primary elections. On the eve of the 2013 legislative elections, three political parties decided, for the first time, to use primaries as the main method of candidate selection. The aim of this article is to analyse some of the characteristics and consequences of the parliamentary primaries in terms of the socio-demographic composition of Parliament and the behaviour of MPs. The evidence provided by the Italian experience shows that inclusive selectorates seem to promote a higher level of female representation in the assembly and the inclusion of younger people. As far as the legislative behaviour of MPs is concerned, parliamentarians selected through primaries show the highest rates of attendance. Finally, with regard to the level of productivity and the frequency of rebellion, the results of our analysis do not lead to any clear conclusions. However, interestingly enough, MPs selected through inclusive processes demonstrate a lower propensity to vote against the agreed positions of their parliamentary groups.

Primary elections between fortuna and virtù

ABSTRACT Primaries have become an almost indispensable tool of the political game in the Italian centre-left coalition and, especially, within the Democratic Party. This article explores what has led to this important institutional change in the candidate and leadership selection processes. It assesses the consequences with reference to both competition and inclusiveness. It concludes by stressing that, frequent, undocumented and unfounded criticisms notwithstanding, Italian primaries have played, and promise to continue to play, quite a positive role in the Italian political system.

Government alternation in Western Europe : a comparative exploration

In the last thirty years, alternation in government has become a common practice in Western Europe. Unfortunately, democratic theories and theorists have hitherto mostly neglected or taken for granted this crucial phenomenon in many political systems. This thesis aims to fill this gap between theory and practice. In the first part, the dissertation puts forward a new and original conceptual toolkit for the analysis of government alternation across countries and through time. Three dimensions, or faces, of the concept of alternation (i.e. actuality, possibility and probability) are singled out, defined and thoroughly operationalised. This process of concept reconstruction makes it possible to paint a large historical fresco of the development of government alternation in Western Europe throughout the whole post-war period. The second part of the thesis is devoted to the empirical analysis of the suggested determinants of alternation in government. All the factors that may have an impact on the occurrence of alternation in its manifold manifestations are scrutinised and correlated to the diverse ways in which West European party systems change their cabinets across space and time. Furthermore, the analysis carried out in this part of the thesis directly challenges much of the conventional wisdom that has accompanied the study of alternation since its uncertain inception. More precisely, the results of the bivariate analyses show that the occurrence of alternation is not strictly correlated with the fragmentation of the party systems or the proportionality of the electoral systems. Other factors, such as the existence (and the strength) of anti-system parties, the role of pivotal actors, voters’ availability to change their electoral behaviour or the cabinet size, contribute to the explanation of the emergence and the persistence of a pattern of alternation in government. In the last part of the thesis, I carried out a comparative time-series cross-section analysis of the determinants of government alternation in seventeen West European countries. Partially, this set of multivariate analyses confirms some of the evidence collected in the previous section. However, and in addition to that, the large-N statistical analysis demonstrates that different explanatory factors account for the variation in the three dimensions of alternation suggested above. Moreover, the same argument holds true for the explanation of the development of government alternation, in particular its accelerated rise since the 1980s. Finally, in the concluding chapter I analyse, firstly, the foreseeable evolution of government alternation in Western Europe, especially in relation to the impact of the current economic crisis on the functioning of West European democracies. Secondly, the chapter closes with the suggestion of a new typology of party systems based on the existence of a bipolar pattern of inter-party competition and the possibility of a wholesale replacement of the governing parties. Jury: Prof Hanspeter Kriesi (EUI), Prof Ferdinand Mueller-Rommel (University of Lünenburg), Prof Gianfranco Pasquino (University of Bologna), Marco Valbruzzi (candidate), Prof Stefano Bartolini (EUUI, supervisor)

The impact of the 2013 general election on the Italian political system: the end of bipolarism?

This article offers an in-depth analysis of the way in which the results of the 2013 national elections have changed the Italian political system, with a particular emphasis on the crisis and possible end of bipolarism, and its consequences. Following a long, first phase of the Italian Republic in which bipolarism was neither practiced nor possible, the second phase (1994–2013) exhibited a muscular competition between two slightly changing political coalitions. It was also characterized by full, though often confused, rotation in government after each and every election. In the wake of the inconclusive February 2013 elections, the significant electoral success of the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five-Star Movement), and the formation of two governments occupying the center of the political alignment, two oppositions have made their appearance. The declining Forza Italia (FI) seems unable to launch any challenge to the incumbent government, while the M5S has so far positioned itself as an anti-system actor. Bipolarism seems no longer feasible unless a new electoral law restructures the party system and revives a decent European-style bipolar competition.