ABSTRACT
Between the 1950s and the early 1990s the Italian Christian Democratic Party (DC) proved to be one of the most successful parties in Western Europe, if viewed from the perspectives of electoral support and holding office. The party consistently obtained over a third of the vote and on three occasions over 40 per cent. It was the major party of every governing coalition and provided the prime minister for every government except two until the party’s transformation into the Italian Popular Party (PPI, the name of the DC’s pre-war predecessor) in January 1994. The principal reason for this persistence in office was the peculiarity of the Italian party system, and specifically the perceived need to exclude from power the largest communist party in the West, the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which consistently obtained over a quarter of the vote and as much as a third. In this situation the DC, as the largest party, governed in coalition with three or four other parties.1 The DC’s penetration and politicization of the state as a result of this permanence in office has been well-documented: the party was a regime party par excellence.2
