ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the special issue of West European Politics devoted to Italian politics, which was published in 1979. It came at the end of a decade of social, economic and political crisis in which Italy was portrayed as the sick man of Europe. The Italian impasse can be expressed in terms of its incapacity for internally generated political reform and inescapable drift towards systemic crisis an expression used by Maurizio Ferrera to describe the Italian welfare system, but applicable, to the entire polity. The structural crisis is rooted in the institutional arrangements of the country and in the norms of political behaviour. The conjunctural crisis is the expression of the sudden breakdown of political parties, alliances and networks that were, on the one hand, partly responsible for the systemic problems of the country, and partly its victims. Crisis and transition, became inseparable, the former closely shaping the course of the latter.
