The Nature of the Italian Party System

A Regional Case Study

Geoffrey Pridham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317339700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This study, first published in 1981, focuses on a single region of Italy – Tuscany, and examines the internal and external relationships of the parties, their evolution and their roles in the years 1975-1980. Looking in depth and detail at the activity of the parties in Tuscany, the book identifies and examines different factors of change and continuity and comes to the conclusion that there has been significant movement in the political positions and strengths of the respective parties as well as in their strategic courses and inter-relationships.

This volume has a particular importance due to the questioning of many previously held assumptions of the country's party system in the light of political and socio-economic change during the 1970's. This title will be of interest to students of European politics.

1	THE NATURE OF THE ITALIAN PARTY SYSTEM

The thesis of this book is that the Italian party system has undergone a process of unprecedented change during the decade of the 1970s which requires not merely an updated survey of its development but rather a re-interpretation of the nature of that system. It is of course a truism to say that party systems do or should change in that they are required as viable frameworks for political development — that is, expecially in democratic systems political parties are central to the process of socio-political integration and interest aggregation. However, in the Italian case many assumptions made about its party system based on the experience of its operation in the postwar decades preceding the 1970s have to be reviewed and modified. This qualitative transformation in the nature of the Italian party system has derived both from the evolution of the different parties, individually and in relation to each other, and from the changing socio-political and economic environment in Italy.

While therefore ‘political change’ is somewhat relative as a term of reference, when applied to an evolutionary situation, there are many indices which support the conclusion that change in Italian party development during the 1970s has been of fundamental importance. The most obvious evidence has come from the uncustomary mobility in voting behaviour compared with the previously extremely stable patterns. The continuously dominant role of the DC since the late 1940s has been significantly weakened, even though it has remained the senior party in national government; while at the same time the PCI as the other main party has increasingly assumed positions of political authority at different levels of the state structure, more than ever since the War. Furthermore, this latter development in particular has involved a new departure in inter-party relationships with the replacement of the former polarised divide between the DC and PCI with a more competitive situation. While it may be said of the PCI’s strategy of the ‘historic compromise’ that as a proposition it is indeed ‘historic’ because of the new governing role claimed and partially acquired by that party, as a form of ‘compromise’ in practice it is not so essentially new. Thus, the Italian party system has in the 1970s featured the same political parties as earlier, but their positions and courses have altered as a major component of the new situation.

Italy has not been exceptional in Western Europe, where many other national party systems have faced serious problems of change partly arising from similar causes (notably common economic pressures from world inflation), but the quality of her party system has been particularly essential to the functioning of Italy’s relatively young parliamentary democracy. It is important, however, to establish to what extent this process of political change in the 1970s may be a long-term development and not just a passing phase. This process will therefore be placed in the broader context of the historical evolution of Italian political parties especially since Fascism, reference will be made to different theoretical interpretations of the Italian party system while establishing the latter’s interest for the comparative study of political parties, the question of regional government will be examined as a test case of the attitudes and positions of the various parties towards institutional reform and, finally, the impact on party development of social and economic changes in the 1970s, and what problems these present for a re-interpretation of the party system in Italy, will be discussed.

(a) Italian Political Parties: the Historical Perspective

Far from presenting a detailed account of the historical development of Italian parties from pre-Fascist times, it is considered necessary here in view of the approach of this study to focus on various key questions relating to this entire period for the purpose of outlining the main leitmotivs and aspects of party development in Italy. The most suitable framework of reference is that offered by Eckstein and Apter, who identify three essential relationships when examining the general role of political parties: their relationship to the state, to the national community and between themselves.¹ It will be seen that in all three cases the crucial historical watershed in Italy was the Fascist period, as this not only interrupted previous patterns of party development but also provided through the subsequent consensus of anti-Fascism a basic point of ideological reference for the postwar period as well as reinforced features of mass politics in Italy inadequately developed in a democratic context before the rise of Mussolini.

Looking at the first of these criteria, it clearly emerges that the principal difference between the pre-Fascist and post-Fascist periods in the relationship between the parties and the state lies in the degree of centrality of the former’s role with respect to the latter. While Italian political parties acting as the predominant channel of political communication, policy-making, leadership recruitment and access to public office have been in existence since the Second World War, they did not essentially perform that function before the advent of the Fascist state. This difference becomes evident when turning to the role of parties in the earlier period.

The salient characteristic of the half-century or more from the unification of Italy to Fascism was the dominance of an exclusive political class enjoying control of the centralised state machine without reference to a mass political base and without challenge from an effective opposition. This political class, called the ‘historic Right’ (or later the Liberals), which ruled Italy from the time of Cavour, was drawn from the landed and commercial bourgeoisie, notably from Piedmont, but in strictly party-political terms was little more than an incohesive collection of political groupings held together by the habit in government of arriving at ad hoc or pragmatic policy arrangements to the mutual satisfaction of the different interests represented by this class — a system generally known as trasformismo. The Liberals’ control of the state and monopoly of parliamentary representation was made possible by a highly restricted franchise and facilitated by the weakness or virtual absence of opposition. As Salomone has written, this period was marked by the fact that there was ‘no organised opposition to factions, cliques and camarillas, which skirmished in Parliament until the rise of the Socialists at the end of the century’.² Moreover, even with the appearance of this first organised political force in modern Italian history, the two traditional political sub-cultures of Socialism and Catholicism (represented by various Catholic associations which amounted to a loose movement at this stage) were located on the periphery of the political system until the end of the First World War. In particular, the Catholics as a political movement were restrained by the Vatican prohibition on their political participation as a consequence of the Papal non-recognition of the newly unified Italian state. The consequence was a Liberal regime but one with a pronounced lack of socio-political integration and a potentially vulnerable state of legitimacy. The enlargement of the franchise under Giolitti in 1913 and the early political success of the Catholic Popular Party (PPI), founded in 1919 after the lifting of the Papal ban, came too late to strengthen the partypolitical basis of the parliamentary state and check the destabilising impact of the First World War on Italian politics. The Fascist period followed with the proscription of other parties under the one-party state.

Party development after two decades of Fascist rule was qualitatively very different from that prevalent during the Liberal period. First, the Fascist state had introduced the concept and practice of the party acting as a pervasive capillary organism present throughout different levels of society and enjoying an intensive relationship with the state apparatus. This precedent, fostered in a one-party framework, influenced postwar party development in the new democratic context most conspicuously in the elaborate organisational presence of the DC and PCI in Italian society since the Second World War. Furthermore, during the Fascist period the hostility between the Roman Catholic Church and the Italian state had been solved through the Concordat of 1929, which was incorporated in the postwar Constitution of 1948. Secondly, as this Constitution underlined in its Article 49 (‘All citizens have the right to associate freely in political parties in order to contribute through democratic procedure to the determination of national policy’), the primacy of competitive political parties as channels of political communication was already established before the inauguration of the postwar political system and they came to dominate its functioning. This dominance developed to such an extent that it became known as partitocrazia (‘rule by parties’); that is, a system in which the political parties are not only the controlling power in the decision-making processes of the state, but also permeate the activities of public life in general.³

The question of the centrality of the parties’ role may be taken one stage further by asking whether they have also had a unifying or legitimising effect on the Italian political system by way of counter-balancing the renowned inefficiency of the Italian state administration, such structural and social cleavages as those reflected in the north/south divide, centrifugal factors like regionalism and the provincialism of Italian life and, above all, the lack of popular attachment to the nation-state to which Almond and Verba paid attention.⁴ This question has been often raised and contested. On the one hand, Galli and Prandi have argued positively that the PCI in particular has acted ‘as a primary force in the process of “nationalisation of politics”, that is, of the progressive spreading throughout the country of national political agencies and issues’,⁵ and that the DC has performed similarly through its network of Catholic associations. Although this organisational penetration of Italian public life by the main parties is undeniable, other writers (notably Sartori) have maintained that the confusion engendered by Italian party life has acted as a factor promoting alienation from the system;⁶ while it has also been argued that the weak internal cohesion of the ruling parties, especially the DC, has detracted from the performance of successive Italian governments.⁷ One important approach, often overlooked in general studies of Italian politics, is to examine the sub-national levels of party activity for this allows a more profound, as well as specific, survey of the organisational presence of the respective parties and its political importance, the extent to which they penetrate or absorb Italian provincial life and whether their individual strategies are more than just political arrangements devised in Rome. In short, these levels of activity reveal more than national politics, whether the political parties are centripetal or centrifugal agents in the operation of the political system. Sidney Tarrow has already indicated the value of this approach in his discussion of centre-periphery relations in Italian politics.⁸

Finally, one major reservation must be noted about the competitive basis of the relationship of parties to the state. The DC has been the senior governing party of Italy continuously since 1945, not merely because of its electoral strength — which has remained around 40 per cent, except for its one absolute majority in 1948 — as the fact that its power position has been sustained ideologically by an anti-Communist consensus involving an alliance with smaller parties and that it has consolidated its tenure of office through ‘populating’ the politico-economic establishment, notably the bureaucracy, the public corporations and the judiciary. It is in this sense that the dictum ‘with 40% of the votes, the DC controls 80% of the power’ has its application. Consequently, while electorally the DC and PCI have been the two dominant forces in Italy it is the former which has dominated within the political structure, so that it is permissible to speak of a ‘DC regime’ or even ‘DC state’. The extent to which this dominance has differed from the Liberal and Fascist regimes will be shown by the next section, and the way in which it has come under challenge is a theme of this book.

The second form of relationship, that of the political parties to the national community, once again underlines the importance of the Fascist period as the principal historical turning-point in party development. Mussolini’s regime discredited not only Fascism as a political force but also traditional political classes like the Liberals which had collaborated with it, thus creating an immense vacuum on the Centre to Right of the political spectrum only too readily occupied by the newly founded Democrazia Cristiana (DC), which succeeded in mobilising both Catholic and conservative elements. In 1946 the DC won 35 per cent of the vote compared with the 20 per cent of its Catholic predecessor, the PPI, prior to Fascism. The experience of the Resistance gave the Left in particular an important opportunity for organisational mobilisation at a mass level unprecedented in Italian politics, an event which distinctly favoured the Communists with thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1. The Nature of the Italian Party System
• 2. The Region of Tuscany: the Case-study Presented
• 3. The Tuscan Communists: the Party of Integration on the Left
• 4. The Tuscan Christian Democrats: the Party of Catholic-Conservative mobilisation
• 5. Inter-party Relationships and the Politics of Convergence: the Tuscan Experience
• Conclusion: Change and Continuity in the Italian Party System
• Note on Sources
• List of Tuscan Communes Visited for Research and Interviews
• List of Interviews
• Published Sources and Bibliography
• Index