Martin Bull - Italy - A Contested Polity.

Italy A Contested Polity

Despite the promise of the new Second Republic launched in the early 1990s, Italy remains Europes 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 political 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. Italys politicians are not just masters of trasformismo (an ability to reinvent and present themselves anew to voters), but of stratificazione, 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 immobilismo is a system in which all parties, and democratic government itself, are steadily losing legitimacy.

This book was published as a special issue of West European Politics.

Martin Bull is Professor of Politics at the University of Salford, UK.

Martin Rhodes is Professor of Political Economy in the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver, USA.

Italy A Contested Polity

Edited by Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes

First published 2009 by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2009 Edited by Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 10: 0-415-47264-4

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-47264-7

West European Politics Series

West European Politics has established itself as the foremost journal for the analysis of European political institutions, politics and public policy. It has a substantial reviews section and coverage of all national elections in Western Europe. Its comprehensive scope, which includes the European Union, makes it essential reading for both academics and political practitioners. The books in this series have originated from special issues published by West European Politics.

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Italy A Contested Polity

Edited by Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes

Luciano Bardi is Professor of Comparative Politics and International Relations at the University of Pisa. He is the co-author of Il Parlamento Europeo (2004), the editor of Partiti e sistemi di partito (2006) and co-editor of I partiti italiani. Organizzazione, iscritti, dirigenti, eletti (2007). His current research focuses on party systems and party organisations. []

Martin Bull is Professor of Politics at the University of Salford and Academic Director of the European Consortium of Political Research, as well as co-editor of the journals Modern Italy and European Political Science. An Italian politics specialist, his recent publications include Italian Politics: Adjustment under Duress (Polity, 2005), co-authored with James Newell. []

Maurizio Carbone is a lecturer in European politics at the University of Glasgow. He has written on foreign aid, EU external relations, and Italys foreign and development policies. His book The European Union and International Development: The Politics of Foreign Aid is to be published by Routledge in late 2007. []

Marcello de Cecco is Professor of Monetary and Financial History at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy). He is the author of Money and Empire, Changing Money, and Gli anni dell incertezza. His current research is on emergency central bank lending in Asia and on collective behaviour and bank branch expansion in Italy. []

Pepper D. Culpepper is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of Creating Cooperation and co-editor of Changing France and The German Skills Machine. His current research focuses on the politics of corporate governance reform in the advanced capitalist countries. []

Donatella Della Porta is Professor of Sociology at the European University Institute. Among her recent publications are: Globalization from Below; Quale Europa? Europeizzazione, identit e conflitti; Social Movements: An Introduction; Transnational Protest and Global Activism; and The Policing of Transnational Protest. On political corruption, she has written, among others, Corrupt Exchanges (with Alberto Vannucci). []

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Matthew Hibberd is Deputy Head and Director of the MSc in Public Relations by Online Learning in the Department of Film and Media Studies, University of Stirling, Scotland. He is a Visiting Professor in the Interdisciplinary Centre for Social Communications (CICS) at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome. His latest book Il grande viaggio della BBC: storia del servizio pubblico britannico dagli anni Venti al digitale was published by RAI in February 2006. []

Oscar Molina is an IRCHSS Postdoctoral Fellow at the Industrial Relations and Human Resources Group, University College Dublin. He studied economics in Barcelona and obtained his PhD at the European University Institute, Florence. His research focuses on the analysis of institutional change in the political economies of southern Europe, patterns of corporatist intermediation and regulatory change in industrial relations. []

Letizia Paoli is a Full Professor at the Leuven Institute of Criminology of the KU Leuven Faculty of Law, Belgium. Since the 1990s she has published extensively on the Italian mafia, organised crime, drugs and illegal markets. She received her PhD in social and political sciences from the European University Institute in Florence in 1997. []

Gianfranco Pasquino is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna. He has also been teaching for 30 years at the Bologna Center of Johns Hopkins University. Former editor of the bi-monthly