Crisis as a Permanent Condition?: The Italian Political System Between Transition and Reform Resistance

Italy is in need of fundamental institutional reforms in order to stay internationally competitive and to regain the capability of efficient policy-making. This is the unanimous and longstanding tenor of political observers as well as of the political actors themselves - more relevant than ever following both the dramatic parliamentary elections’ results in February 2013 as well as the current radical efforts of Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to overhaul the established institutional structures. However, expectations of a fundamental socio-political turn were already dashed in the 1990s. Then, in response to the party system’s collapse and the widespread tangentopoli corruption scandals, it was almost taken for granted that comprehensive and far-reaching reforms would be implemented in order to tackle structural problems that had been revealed by these scandals. However, so far substantial change has not been reached in the Italian political institutional system. In this volume, various aspects of the inherent dynamics of the Italian political system will be dealt with from an interdisciplinary perspective, taking into account the analysis of Italy’s socio-political history as well as the country’s political system and its elites’ configuration. The volume provides an in-depth and sound understanding of the various inherent reform obstacles established in the Italian political system. It offers profound insights into the existing options for institutional change, critically discussed by leading international experts of Italian politics.