ABSTRACT
Any disruption to the pattern of Christian Democrat dominance was hailed as an earth-shattering event. Thus the near ‘overtaking’ of the DC by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1976 was described as an ‘earthquake’ (Ghini 1976), but the foundations of political Catholicism were able to withstand the Left’s assault, and the walls of Jericho remained standing. The seeming impossibility of electoral realignment in Italy prompted many political scientists and sociologists to speculate on the reasons for the country’s apparent political under-development, a charge that had originally been made by Almond and Verba in their influential study of political culture in the 1960s (Almond and Verba 1963).
