XXIX Cycle [email protected]

Giovanni Amerigo Giuliani, PhD Candidate, Scuola Normale Superiore, Istituto di Scienze Umane (SNS), XXIX cycle [email protected] Call for Papers XXIX Convegno SISP Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali - Arcavacata di Rende (Cosenza), 10 - 12 settembre 2015. (Working Paper) Welfare State and Political Parties in Italy: New Changes in the Italian Party System? 1. Introduction Party system change has always been a topic extensively examined and discussed in the literature. Indeed, while there is wide consensus in the academic community that western European party systems are experiencing a process of change (Mair and Smith 1990), the scope and the consequences of these changes are still being debated. On the one hand, a body of research has concluded that western European party systems on the whole have remained remarkably stable (Mair 1997; 2004). These works profoundly support the stability hypothesis, i.e., they state that Lipset and Rokkan’s freezing hypothesis (1967) still remains valid as the party alternatives identified by the two scholars are still present. On the other hand, other studies have emphasized discontinuities in the development of national party systems, arguing that they have undertaken a defrost path (Kriesi, 2008; 2012). Within this debate, the Italian party system has been reported as an interesting case of party system change, in particular since the crisis of the Prima Repubblica and the resulting political earthquake (Morlino 1996; D’Alimonte and Bartolini, 2002). From representing a clear example of polarized pluralism (Sartori, 1976), with the emergence of the Seconda Repubblica, the Italian party system changed its configuration drastically, even though labelling it as a moderate pluralism is still controversial (Morlino and Tarchi, 2006). Different factors have been taken into consideration as possible explanans of such a change, including such institutional arrangements as electoral laws, the emergence of new parties models, the turnover of parliamentary leadership and the appearance of new political competitors (Morlino, 1996; Pappalardo 1996). These studies have undoubtedly given a comprehensive view of the topic, highlighting the dynamics leading to party system change and providing theoretical tools for the study of the Italian party system. Nonetheless, a narrower, in-depth, focus on the qualitative dimension of the party system i.e., its polarization - defined by Sartori (1976) as the ideological distances between the parties - and in particular on the polarization or depolarization over the welfare issues, in the light of the exogenous and endogenous factors pressuring the Italian welfare state, could offer some new interesting insights in the study of the Italian party system and of its alteration. Taking into consideration the political legacy acquired from the First Repubblica as well as the role played by different ideological paradigms in shaping party competition, in particular in the economic and social field- from the old social-democratic consensus to the neoliberal paradigm, with a specific focus on the gradual emergence of the liberal neo-welfarism (Ferrera, 2014)- this paper aims at exploring the extent to which the internal and external pressures on the welfare state – i.e. economic globalization, the process of the European 1 integration, social structure change and domestic economic change due to de-industrialization - have contributed to polarizing or de-polarizing the Italian party system during the Seconda Republica. In other words, the research question is: to what extent has the ideological distance on Welfare state issues that characterized the immediate post-war decades been reduced, eliminated or reframed in the light of the exogenous and endogenous pressures affecting the Italian welfare state? Before proceeding, two important qualifications are required. The first is that the article is only a preliminary study of what will constitute a broader and more careful research, and thus aims only at giving a partial view of the topic analysed. Therefore, theory, data as well as the method employed are mainly intended as starting points and will be successively reinforced. The second qualification concerns the theoretical grounding of my argument. Clearly, the change of the Italian party system cannot be ascribable merely to the internal and external pressures on the welfare state. A complex set of different factors contributes to the general polarization - or de-polarization - and the fragmentation of the party system. Therefore, I do not claim there is only one casual mechanism that explains the party system change. Indeed, my point is that such a casual mechanism linking Italian party system change with the pressures on the welfare state deserves to be taken into consideration as one among many. The paper is organised as follows. In the first section I will provide a concise theoretical ground of my argument, then I will provide a brief overview of those external and internal factors, which in the literature have been counted as pressuring the European welfare state in general and the Italian Welfare State in particular. In the third section I will discuss the method employed. In the following section, mixing a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Italian party manifestos, and placing them in the historical context, I will try to provide a general overview concerning the extent to which the Italian party system has been polarized or de-polarized as far as welfare issues are concerned. The last section will be devoted to the conclusion. 2. Party Competition, Polarization and the Neo-Liberal Welfarism Paradigm. Scholars have investigated in depth to explain how in the last several decades party system, and in particular party competition, has been structured around the social divisions existing within a polity. Rokkan and Lipset’s work (1967) has shown how ideological and partisan divisions derived from the social cleavages in a nation and how differences between competing social groups have been the basis for political conflict. Such cleavages seem to persist over the time; indeed, in the wake of some critical historical junctures, they became crystallized or frozen, i.e., they became embedded in, and supported by a particularly dense network of organizations, especially partisan organizations, whose main effect is to reproduce the structures themselves (Rokkan and Lipset, 1967; Ferrera, 2005). To be more precise, it seems fair to say that party competition in Western Europe has been mainly developed around the class cleavage, i.e., owners vs. workers. The classic Left-Right dimension of party competition has represented such social clash for a long time. As Dalton (2002) has pointed out, the theoretical and empirical strength of this class cleavage derives from the fact that it properly reflects different ideologies on the nature of politics and economics, and the ideal relationship between these two social systems. On the right of the left-right continuum, economic conservatives advocate individual initiative, paying less attention to social and economic inequality, and supporting a limited role for government. On the left, socialists and social democrats favour a more egalitarian society and support government larger role in finding political solutions for the inequalities produced by the social and economic systems. These social conflicts have defined the primary ideological bases of politics in Western democracies and therefore have provided the framework for party competition. Therefore it appears clear that ideological differences on the Left-Right continuum represent a crucial element in the study of party systems and of its change. In a broader perspective, when analysing party system, Dalton (2008) highlighted that one of the more examined properties is the counting of the number of parties, focusing, for instance, on the merits of a two-party system versus 2 a multiparty system (or a range of parties). On the contrary, the scholar argues that instead of counting the quantity of parties, a more important property is often the quality of party competition, i.e., the degree of polarization in a party system. Two distinct approaches can be counted in developing this concept of polarization. First, Downs’s spatial model (1957) provides an early framework for party competition. Such a framework conceptualizes political competition as position-taking along an ideological spectrum, that is, political parties as well as voters are aligned along a Left-Right continuum. In Downs’s analyses (1957), there was already a concern for the degree of polarization in a party system, but, as Dalton (2008) has highlighted, it was expressed more in terms of the number of parties. A second approach was developed in Giovanni Sartori’s (1976; see also Evans, 2002) seminal works concerning political parties. Sartori claims that the established structure of the party system may be described not only by the effective number of parties, which defines its format, but also by the degree of polarization, or ideological distance, between the parties, which defines its mechanics. In other words, party system polarization reflects the degree of ideological differentiation among political parties in a system. In setting up his typology of party systems, Satori therefore takes into consideration both the qualitative and quantitative aspect of the party system, and he distinguishes between systems with centripetal dynamics and systems with

Load more