ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Italy profiles of longstanding democracies and of the European Union, and provides essential detail on history, electoral system, political parties and cleavages, and governments. Italy was a founding member of the then-European Community. The strength of the Communist Party in Italy and the related political polarization meant that the ending of the Cold War had a particularly strong effect both on Italian party politics and its available government options. In contrast, since 1994 Italy has seen wholesale alternation between leftist and rightist governments; that is, alternations between coalitions led by the Democratic Party of the Left/DS/Democratic Party and coalitions led by Forza Italia. Governmental instability has remained, however, and indeed there have been a couple non-partisan technocratic governments. On the left of the political spectrum there were initially only two parties in postwar Italy: the Italian Socialist Party, founded in 1892, and the Communist Party of Italy, founded in 1921.
