ABSTRACT
The most striking feature of the consolidation of democracy in post-war Italy is the length of time the process seems to have taken. The transition phase-from Fascism to republican democracy-was fairly rapid, lasting roughly from 1943 to 1948. Consolidation, it might be argued, was completed only in the 1970s, if then. Indeed, in so far as one external manifestation of consolidation is the successful transfer of power between government and opposition, consolidation has never been completely tested, for an enduring peculiarity of Italian democracy, compared with most other European democracies, including those elsewhere in the Mediterranean, is the absence of clear-cut alternation between competing groups of parties.
