Analysing political change in Italy

Abstract

After more than forty years of inertia, Italy has produced intense dynamism and political change. The literature has been bifurcated in the emphasis on domestic and European factors explaining such an extraordinary transformation. This special issue collects works that use approaches and methods of comparative politics and policy analysis to disentangle the relative importance of European and domestic factors shaping electoral competition, legislative voting behaviour, administrative reform of local authorities, lobbying, the nature of Italian capitalism, and reform of regional, pension and monetary policies. Although any generalization on the Europeanization of the Italian political system is unwarranted, a meso-level non-teleological approach has good leverage in the analysis of political change in Italy.