Italy - A Contested Polity

<p>Despite the promise of the new Second Republic launched in the early 1990s Italy remains Europe’s least well-governed country. Fifteen years ago politicians on the take and mafiosi on the make were supposedly pushed aside by a new generation of reformers and crusading magistrates. However in this new book a team of leading experts on Italy uncovers little real progress. Badly needed reforms have foundered on bickering between the parties and their ego-centric leaders. Both left and right-wing coalitions have been guilty of impeding the anti-corruption revolution. Little has been done to improve the quality of public expenditure: infrastructure and education systems remain shambolic and decades of periodic devaluation and deficit spending have left the economy structurally weakened. Italy’s politicians are not just masters of <em>trasformismo</em> (an ability to reinvent and present themselves anew to voters) but of <em>stratificazione</em> or layering the introduction of new policies and institutions without replacing those that preceded them. The result is a damaging mix of obsolete and contradictory legislation the product of bargaining over reform by chronically weak governments in a veto-ridden polity. The outcome – <em>immobilismo</em> – is a system in which all parties and democratic government itself are steadily losing legitimacy.</p><p>This book was published as a special issue of <em>West European Politics</em>.</p>