Italian Political Landscape: Parties, History, and Transformation
Political Life in Italy
Since the nineteenth century, government interference in the administration has been obvious. There was a clear attempt to separate the constituents of the Government Administration of partidos. This did not occur until 1990, when the regulation of administrative procedure considered the Administration as a set of human activities and behaviors that had to be disciplined.
Modern criteria of economy, effectiveness, efficiency, simplification of procedures, citizen involvement, and streamlined official processes were established. The most tangible result has been a cast of administrative procedures and a 1993 law that authorized the government to regulate more than a hundred of them. Inter-ministerial committees and hundreds of collegiate bodies have been eliminated in public employment provisions unipersonales. These deal with separate governing bodies of the policy of administrative enforcement. However, persistence in the bureaucracy of the organizational culture of the past and the political staff of applications called ministerial feudalism and burdens of litigation are to be overcome.
The Bassanini laws of 1997 empower the Government to adopt comprehensive measures to reorganize the Administration at its central level (Ministries) and peripheral levels (Regions, Provinces, and Municipalities).
Italian Political Parties: The First Republic
The Italian political parties of the First Republic, which were so important for over 40 years and qualified the political regime as party politics, have undergone profound transformations, almost to their disappearance in the 90s of the last century. One can discuss parties during the period of proportional representation (until 1993) and others when the majority system was introduced, although many of the latter are children of the former.
Italy was an example of a multiparty political system, and the nearly perfect proportionality between the electoral percentages and the percentages of seats was a model for many political transitions. It was insisted again that Parliament was a faithful portrait of electoral decisions, leaving aside the task of forming governments in parliamentary systems vested in the legislature.
The Italian Parliament has always had more than 10 parties represented, some with very few seats, but they were required to form majorities. Let’s examine the most important:
Democrazia Cristiana (DC)
The Democrazia Cristiana (DC) is the heir to the Catholic social movements of the late nineteenth century. The top two Catholic deputies came to the House in 1904. In 1918, the Italian Popular Party was founded, which had parliamentary representation in the interwar period and was a partner of the Socialists. The party held up well in the Fascist period, participated in the National Liberation Committee (CLN), and its leader was Prime Minister in 1945. It was the leading party at the 1946 local government elections, a prelude to the elections to the Constituent Assembly, which had an important role of social content and permeated the democratic state which established the Constitution, along with the Communists.
The DC was a mass, cross-class party and learned to play its assets after the war: its status and origins as a Catholic party garnered the support of the Church and the Western allies. Its current status allowed it to have leaders of the center, left, and right, which facilitated coalitions with parties across almost the entire spectrum. It continued to use patronage as a way to get loyal voters and supporters in the administration and public services. It took advantage of the international situation when the communists left the government in 1947 with the beginning of the Cold War.
It has always been the majority party and has never failed to be in power, often shared with other parties, but that has always allowed access to public resources, which could be delivered intelligently. It held the presidency from 1945 to 1981.
This party-regime, or party-state, or Church party, as it has been called, has governed Italy for very contentious periods and has put the country in the G-7, contributing to laying the foundations for the present European Union.
It was the party of the bourgeoisie, but also voted for the peasants, and for decades represented the interests of its electorate, endorsing him. No other parties had splits because obeyed the bishops calls for political unity of Catholics.