ABSTRACT
Nonetheless, the Italian political system was, so to speak, ‘under-governed’. This means, playing on words, that there was too much under-government (clientelism, patronage, corruption) and not enough government (governance, to use the fashionable terminology), that is, Italy was governed well below its potentialities. This under-government was the product of a peculiar combination of ‘unstable governments, relatively stable Ministers and Prime Ministers, lasting coalitions and stagnating policies’ (as I wrote in the first edition of this chapter, Pasquino 1996: 147; see also Hine 1993 for the best overall analysis of the entire period). When the political system collapsed, there was no crisis of Italian democracy, but a crisis within Italian democracy. Technically speaking it was a crisis of the regime, that is, of the norms, rules, and procedures and of the performance of the institutions, not of the legitimacy of the democratic framework. However, another challenge had also made its appearance during the crisis and became part of the crisis.
