Italy

Italian political history after the Second World War is clearly divided into two major phases. The watershed is the so-called Tangentopoli scandal which occurred at the beginning of the 1990s. According to a largely accepted point of view, at that time a ‘Second Republic’ started, featuring characteristics completely different from the political system of the 1948–1992 period. To be honest, critics point to the lack of constitutional amendments to sustain that nothing has really changed in Italian politics. ¹ In any case, the 1993 electoral reform (Katz 2001) and the dramatic turnover affecting the political class at the 1994 general election (Verzichelli 1996) marked a clear break at least for parties and the party system. Using classical indicators of party system change, Italy in the first half of the 1990s is similar to those political systems emerging from a regime transition (Mair 1997; Pennings and Lane 1998). So the often-used expression of an Italian political ‘earthquake’ occurring in the 1990s is surely valid.