Suchergebnisse

Italian political science has grown remarkably in the last two decades both in quantity and quality. Such a growth, however, came much later than in other European countries due to a number of cultural and institutional obstacles. The development of the discipline and the timing of such development are seen as the result of interaction of four broad sets of factors. They are: (1) the effort by scholars in the 1960s to establish political science as a distinct field of study; (2) the social and economic development of Italian society, which called for reform and political modernization; (3) the push from the outside, especially the impact of American political science and behaviouralism; and (4) changes in the Italian university system. The structure and degree of institutionalization of the profession in today's Italy are briefly reviewed in the final section.

The article is an attempt to analyze the current strategy of the Italian Communist Party ("compromesso storico") in the light of consociation theory. It is divided into two parts. Part I explores the foundations and operational traits of consociational democracy as a system which has historically prevailed in countries characterized by strong bourgeois hegemony. Part II explores the applicability of the model to polarized systems. The main argument is that in countries like Italy, political convergence is likely to occur, if at all, through a struggle for hegemony and would result in a pattern of politics both more participatory and dynamic than classic consociational democracy.

SINCE 1976 ITALY HAS BEEN EXPERIENCING A POLITICAL STALEmate which should not be confused with the periodical difficulties of the system. What is at stake is the capacity of Italian democracy to ensure change in a peaceful manner – which I take to be one of the main functions of democracy. The political essence of the crisis lies in the Christian Democrats' (DC) growing incapacity to assure the governability of the country and in the problem of providing an alternative governmental leadership which would include the main opposition party, the Communist Party (PCI).The resulting impasse is what explained both Moro's insistence on the need for a 'great national solidarity' and the PCI's strategy of the 'historic compromise'. Convergence found political expression in the grand coalition governments which ruled Italy between 1976 and 1979, the first majority in thirty years which included the PCI.On the analytical level, convergence in polarized systems like Italy's can be fruitfully analysed, as I have suggested elsewhere, from the viewpoint of the consociational model. I shall first briefly review the model before turning to a discussion of the prospects for cooperation after the 1979 general elections.