Governments and Parties in Italy: Parliamentary Debates, Investiture Votes and Policy Positions (1994-2006)

This book challenges the traditional approaches to party system analysis and policy space. It offers a survey of the most recent changes in Italian party politics. It puts forward an original comparison of the policy positions of seven Italian coalition governments and of the relative policy positions of the Italian parliamentary parties from 1994 to 2006. That decade was crucial in recent Italian political history because since 1994 the party system in Italy has been going through a process of realignment. After almost 50 years of political immobility, Italian democracy has finally begun to work according to the principle of alternating power between government incumbents and the opposition. Specific methodology was developed for this research, with the political 'themes' articulated by Government and Parliamentary leaders treated as expressions of political preferences. Rather than positioning the parties on predetermined left-right scales, the 'spaces of competition' were derived directly by the political debates in parliament.