ABSTRACT
During the 1970s, the last defenders of the Partito socialista italiana's (PSI) historic role as part of the labor movement fought a desultory and ultimately doomed battle to restore the Party to its ideological roots and its place alongside other parties of the Italian left. There is a risk, in analyzing the Italian Socialist Party's performance in the 1992 election, of interpreting the outcome through events which took place for the most part after the election. In the 1992 election itself, the PSI's performance was disappointing compared to the expectations built up over the previous decade, but it was not disastrous. By 1980s, the PSI was back in government, and the Communists once more in the opposition. The strategy pursued by the PSI in the 1987-1992 parliament was thus badly presented, badly managed, and failed to address the growing public sentiment that what was needed was something far stronger than a minor rebalancing of forces within the ruling coalition.
