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Italian Political Parties Most Americans' first exposure to Italian p

Most Americans' first exposure to Italian politics has come upon hearing news reports that "the Italian government has fallen." This alarmingsounding item is then followed by an explanation that it is the fortysomethingth postwar Italian govenment to "fall," and that the previous one "fell," unnoticed, a few months before.

This introduction can lead to a lasting impression of politics in Italy as comprising an outward facade of comicopera turmoil concealing a core of businessasusual stability. This impression is widespread, and both Italians and nonItalians share it. One recent American study of Italian political culture unashamedly adopts a comicopera title, Democracy, Italian Style (LaPalombara 1987). Italians themselves speak of their political system in terms of its outward show, spettacolo, "spectacle," and the interior process of transformismo by which the actual administration of government is at once linked to and cushioned from politics.

The following is a study of the major Italian political parties, their ideology, organization, and function within the Italian political process. They are best considered considered not in a vacuum, but instead by comparison to the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States. Such a comparison will highlight a basic point, that Italian parties function in a political environment so different from that of the American parties that they have developed into a quite different sort of entity from their American counterparts. It is not simply a matter of saying that on the conventional ideological fan, from far left to far right, no Italian parties correspond to our Democrats and Republicans, or of learning that the Liberals are a party of the Right, to the right of the Republicans. It is rather that Italians expect political parties to play a very different role than that which Americans assign to their parties, and they identify with their parties...

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Italian Political Parties Most Americans' first exposure to Italian p. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 03:52, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1700296.html