The Second Berlusconi government, the parties and the president: a new European policy?

Abstract

In recent years the Italian party system has experienced major changes. The crisis of party government caused by the collapse of the ‘First Republic’ and its main political parties might make Italy a less party-centered polity. Since the 1970s the hypothesis of a general decline and loss of influence of political parties at the expense of national executives and autonomous bureaucratic organizations has attracted a lot of interest. It is argued that changes in interest mediation and representation, the constraints of a more global economy and the fiscal crisis of the welfare state are causing the retreat of party government from the policy and decision-making function. The state-centered, new institutionalism and corporatist literature have made the argument concerning the decline of party government. In Italy beginning in the 1990s, a crisis of the major political parties has been noted and according to this view a suspension of party government has occurred as technocrats, the president of the republic and the bureaucracy were responsible for making important political decisions. Given that Italy does not have a highly professional bureaucratic apparatus or highly institutionalized corporatist structures of interest representation, it is argued that the threat toward Italian party government has come primarily from the evolution of the role of the president of the republic. The emergency situation of the 1990s resulted in an expansion of the president’s role in the policy-making process, which went beyond the norm of a parliamentary democracy such as Italy. Specifically it is argued that the evolution of the Italian political system toward a variant of French semi-presidentialism has reduced the role of the parties in the policy-making process. In contrast to the parties, the president has assumed increasing responsibilities in the decision-making process and his prerogatives now resemble those of the French president. Thus, the paper aims to determine whether Italy appears to have indeed moved in a direction posited by the party decline hypothesis with a more limited