In the Labyrinth. State, Governments ... Tedoldi, RSS (2016), 01(02), 07-18 Review of Social Sciences, 01(02), 07-18 Vol. 01, No. 02: February (2016) Review of Social Sciences Open access available at http://socialsciencejournal.org In the Labyrinth. State, Governments, and the Growth of the Public Debt in Italy in the Middle of 1980s Leonida Tedoldi a* a Department of Human Sciences, Area of Political Studies, University of Verona, Italy. *Corresponding author’s email address:
[email protected] A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T Received: 28-10-2015 The ambition of this work is to rethink and present a possible path of historical- Accepted: 13-02-2016 institutional investigation in relation to and with a critical comparison of solid Available online: 20-02-2016 economic, political and sociological research into the political causes of rapid increase of public debt and its ‘instrumentalization’ by coalition governments for the purposes Keywords: of consensus, in the blocked political-institutional system, as the first Executives in the Contemporary History, Italian Republic’s history not led by Christian Democrats (DC) Prime Minister. History of Political Institutions, The reason for the decision to concentrate the analysis on a reduced portion of that Italian Public Debt, decade – and therefore chronologically not going past 1988-89, the year of a passage to Political Economics, a different phase for many aspects – responds to the intention of concentrating the Political Science, analysis and delving into the sources (archival and institutional sources, but also Public Debt.