The aim of this paper is to analyse the evolution of the Italian public funding regime, in the light of the assumptions of the cartel party thesis. In the mid-1990s, the debate on party and party system change was revitalised by R. Katz and P. Mair (1995), who introduced the concept of the ‘cartel party’ as a means to study the increasing influence of the state on party politics. Among the main analytical dimensions of the cartel party argument, the system-level variables have received little attention with respect to the Italian case. In what follows I try to find out empirical evidence for the hypothesised changes in the relationship between parties and the state and in the patterns of inter-party competition. I will analyse the trends of the law-making process in the domain of party funding (1948–2014), by combining these observations with data on parties’ reliance on state funds and party collusive behaviour.

The term ‘transnational history’ has made rapid ground in recent scholarly debate. In some ways the latest manifestation of an approach that has been variously described as international, comparative, world or global history, transnational history seeks to overcome a historiography focused on the nation and to displace the focus on the nation-state by studying non-governmental institutions, civil associations, informal groups and/or individual actors. Its primary claim to innovation lies in an emphasis on movement, interaction and interpenetration between and across different groups, societies and political units. Thus, the main concern of transnational history is with linkages and networks, perhaps especially in the so-called ‘Global South’; with respect to the latter, an implicit aim of the approach is to challenge the ‘Eurocentrism’ characteristic of historical writing at least since the Enlightenment.

Over the last fifteen years, independent rock music has become a wider field of cultural production and consumption in Italy. Indeed, while during the 1970s and 1990s the production of independent music was connected predominantly to political movements, alternative subcultures and the antagonistic attitude of the ‘centri sociali’, in the present decade, independent popular music has moved towards the centre of the national music industry and the mass media of the musical mainstream. This article describes the phases of this process of institutionalisation, showing how the politically based culture of independent music is today at the centre of a symbolic struggle occurring between the values of authenticity, rooted in political youth cultures, and the strategic and pragmatic tendency towards integration into the mainstream of the national music industry. This analysis is carried out applying the Bourdieian concepts of ‘field of cultural production’ and ‘cultural capital’, together with their evolutions into the notion of ‘subcultural capital’. This theoretical framework is applied in order to show both the process of institutionalisation this cultural field is undergoing, and the symbolic struggle taking place between the original values of the political and cultural autonomy of music and the commoditisation of musical objects in the mainstream mass media and national industrial sector. Finally, it is shown how new agents who represent the independent popular music industry at the national level need to deal with claims for authenticity raised by the alternative and extreme wings of the independent music scene.

Recent years have witnessed new processes of visibilisation of adult heterosexual men's sexuality in the public arena in Italy, culminating in discussions on sexual scandals. The authors explore here one of these processes: the current mediatisation of a medicalised male sexuality, which appears as a more socially legitimate and scientifically grounded new discourse on masculinity. By analysing recent social campaigns on male sexual health, it will be shown how, far from opening spaces for a de-naturalisation of male sexuality and masculinity, this form of visibility through medicalisation actually works by re-naturalising male sexuality, and thereby restoring virility, through reference to highly gendered respectability and predatory sexual scripts and the disempowering of intimacy as a new sexual script promoting a situational and more symmetric understanding of gender.

This article assesses the impact that direct election of regional presidents has had on party politics in Italy. It finds regional presidents exert a growing personalisation of power within parties at sub-national levels, primarily through their capacity for political nomination and de facto status as party negotiators in the governing coalition. While presidents may shape structures of regional party competition, they remain constrained by coalitional politics and can struggle to assert their authority against powerful governing partners or local powerbrokers rooted in the legislature. They also possess few mechanisms to consolidate their position at national level, consistent with a broader tendency towards ‘stratarchy’ in multi-level parties. Although the distinction between densely and loosely structured parties remains relevant, a common trend towards ‘cartelisation’ at sub-national levels is noted as political parties prioritise the control of state resources and the governing legitimacy this entails. This article contributes to our broader understanding of the multi-level dynamics of party politics in Europe, as well as the unintended consequences of experimenting with an untested hybrid model of ‘directly elected Prime Minister’ in the Italian regions.

Italian capitalism has long been distinguished by the large size of the public enterprise sector and the power of large family firms, underpinned by powerful networks of inter-firm alliance orchestrated by the merchant bank, Mediobanca. This article seeks to analyse the extent to which the current programme of privatization is serving not only to shrink the size of, but to transform the structure of, power in the private sector. While some reformers have seen in privatization an instrument to encourage the adoption of Anglo-Saxon forms of corporate governance in Italy, it is argued here that the evidence of recent changes indicates the emergence of a more differentiated pattern of corporate governance rather than the triumph of any single model.

Mussolini was the prototype of twentieth-century charismatic dictators. His personal charisma antedated the founding of Fascism and the formal construction of collective charisma through the movement and the personality cult. First forged in the socialist movement, Mussolini's charisma assumed a new guise when he became a supporter of Italy's intervention in the First World War. He acquired an aura for the third time as Fascist leader. There were always tensions between the Duce and Fascism as the latter embodied the collective charisma of a movement. Nevertheless, Fascist ideology and culture incorporated the idea of the charismatic leader as a focus and source of authority on the model of the Catholic Church. Although it was difficult by the 1930s to distinguish between the believer's exaltation and courtly adulation, Mussolini exercised a personal charisma for many Fascists even after his death.

This article examines the surrogacy debate that has developed within contemporary feminist and LGBT movements in Italy, following the approval of the law on civil unions at the beginning of 2016. This debate has been marked by a deep fracture between those who see in surrogate motherhood a chance to imagine new forms of social bonds and those who consider that women’s wombs and newborn children can never be the object of an economic ‘exchange’. I will first analyse the most controversial positions held by some feminists who have participated in the debate, which revolve around the centrality of the maternal figure. Then I will outline a brief history of the social construction of pregnancy, linking it to changes in the marketplace and the birth of biopolitics. Finally, with the help of Angela Putino’s philosophical thought I will advance a potentially different feminist approach to the issue of surrogate motherhood.

This article examines a number of the major works on Italy conducted by political scientists from the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on the research of Banfield, Almond and Verba, Tarrow and Putnam, it discusses the interpretations of Italy offered by these scholars and examines the contribution they have made to the political and intellectual debate surrounding the so-called ‘Italian case’. It concludes that the image presented of Italy by American researchers is generally critical and often simplified and stereotypical. Moreover, rather than highlighting the clichés frequently present in such accounts, Italian intellectuals have tended instead to use them in order to construct a wholly negative perspective of Italy and, in many instances, have distorted the original intentions of those American political scientists whose work is cited as evidence.

This article examines the social and political responses to the new flow of immigrants to Italy from outside the European Union. First, the Italian experience is compared with the rest of Europe with respect to such questions as the characteristics of the immigrants themselves, and the response to them on the part of political parties, the church, the unions, and the state at local, regional and national levels. Next, broader comparisons are drawn between the Italian case and that of classic ‘societies of immigration’, particularly with regard to the structure of economic opportunity available to the extracomunitari in Italy.

During the Fascist ventennio, prominent Italian writers and journalists, such as Mario Appelius, Raffaele Calzini, Arnaldo Cipolla, Arnaldo Fraccaroli, Roberto Suster and Cesco Tommaselli, reported from China, Japan and Korea for Il Popolo d'Italia, Corriere della Sera and La Stampa. Their travel narratives were crucial for the creation and diffusion in Italy of the dominant representation of China and Korea as remote, decadent and exotic societies; and of Japan as a progressive society resonant with Fascist Italy. The narrativisation of these countries in Italian travelogues from the Fascist ventennio was part of a widespread discursive practice by Italian intellectuals willing to subscribe to, and actively disseminate, the guiding principles of Fascism. When emphasising China's and Korea's irreconcilable difference from, and Japan's affinity with, Fascist Italy, these intellectuals extolled the Italian race and culture, justified Italy's position in geopolitical dynamics, and propagandised the exceptionality of the Fascist ideology.

This article seeks to explain the Iraq policy of Silvio Berlusconi's second government. Why did Berlusconi's Government declare ‘non-belligerency’ when the American-led war with Iraq began in March 2003? Why did the Government send a mission of 3,000 Italian troops to Iraq in April 2003? Why did Berlusconi announce the progressive withdrawal of that contingent in March 2005? This article recognises the Berlusconi Government's ideologically-rooted pro-American tendencies, but draws on liberal international relations theory to stress the importance of the electoral motive to explain the timing and nature of the Government's decisions. As the Italian public was highly critical of the Iraq war, the Berlusconi Government could not actively participate in the war; it had to frame the deployment as a peace mission and had to begin withdrawing Italian troops before Iraq was stable and secure.

This article aims to provide a systematic, comparative analysis of two of the main women's mass publications in order to trace continuities and changes in the development of women's role in the public sphere in Italy. The analysis begins with an elaboration of the social and political context, which is crucial for the understanding of media texts in general. It shows how the existence of only limited political spaces in post-war Italian society due to the polarisation of Catholicism and communism delayed both an open political discourse on women's conditions and the gradual development of an autonomous and lay feminist movement. Noi Donne of Union Donne Italiene (UDI) was closely aligned with and financed by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and lacked any substantial autonomy until the early 1970s, while Cronache of the Catholic women's organisation Centro Italiano Femminile (CIF) was a faithful instrument for the propagation of those Catholic concepts of femininity that were redefined and reinforced by the Vatican in the Catholic publication Civiltà Cattolica.

Now that the fifteenth legislature has come to an end, it is appropriate to assess the performance of the government whose fall was responsible for this event, as well as the coalition's significance for the trajectory of Italian politics generally. The four articles that follow this one together initiate the task, exploring performance from an institutional and policy-making point of view. This article suggests four criteria for evaluating the performance of any government and offers a brief initial ‘summary report’ in terms of them – paying special attention to implementation of the programme and to communications. Bearing in mind the structural conditions in which it had to work, the government had some notable achievements to its credit, but these same conditions undermined it by opening up an unbridgeable gap between performance and popular perceptions of performance.

This article seeks to clarify some issues in the study of charisma. Personal charisma is seen mainly as deriving from a relationship of trust born in a situation of crisis in which particularly forceful individuals can shape myths and values. It is not necessarily the case that such leaders are psychologically abnormal, although the masses supporting them may have regressed to a primitive psychic state. Cults may be structured or spontaneous or both; in any event, in the Italian case, the experience of Catholic domination and cultural influence has been an important factor in conditioning perceptions of extraordinary leaders. Mussolini was the only national charismatic leader; others including De Gasperi and Togliatti, were mere factional leaders. Although Craxi, Pannella, Berlusconi and Bossi stood out in a time of crisis, they only offered slightly stronger forms of leadership. Finally, Di Pietro is considered as a possible national charismatic leader of the future.

This contribution to the special issue focuses on newsreels and documentaries that were produced concerning the Second Italo–Ethiopian War (1935–1936), commonly known as the Abyssinian War. It aims to contextualise LUCE's filmic production on the war, so as to create a framework in which the institute can be understood not only as being part of a wider politics of propaganda in Fascist Italy, but as an example of a modern socio-technical organisation that enabled the discursive construction of East African nature as ‘Other’ and therefore helped to justify colonial war as a process of sanitised creative destruction aimed at replacing a previous, negative ‘first nature’ with a positive, Fascist and Italian ‘second nature’. The article draws on archival documents from Mussolini's government cabinet, and on LUCE documentaries and newsreels; these sources are used to create a background against which LUCE's concern with the Second Italo–Ethiopian War can be understood.

In this paper, the concepts of city as context, locality and incorporation are applied to the case of Albanian immigrants in Florence. To date, most research on the incorporation of immigrants and its relationship to space is based on the city or the inter-relations between the nation-state and city as contexts where incorporation takes place. The findings of this study show that the relationship between locality and the incorporation of immigrants is multi-dimensional. First, although findings support the role of the urban ethos in immigrants' incorporation, the city is not a homogeneous entity and should not be equated with locality where immigrants' incorporation is concerned. The importance of locality within the city is highlighted by the role played by the qualities of space and aesthetics in immigrants' incorporation and identification. Also, more attention should be paid to intergenerational perceptions of space, as the data show that different generations have different ‘cognitive geographies’ and varying perceptions of space and appreciations of cosmopolitanism, seen here in relation to locality. These aspects should be seen in relation to the historical, structural and cultural particularities of the city as a key context of incorporation, without ignoring the national-level politics of immigration and integration.

Much more so than in the recent past, the eyes of Europe and even of the world are on Italy. This attention does not derive from any innovative solutions that Italy may have offered to the grave problems which today face modern states: those of environmental pollution, of unemployment, of racism, of declining political legitimacy. Rather, Italy has attracted intense scrutiny for two principal reasons. First, because certain courageous magistrates, both in Palermo and Milan, have waged an unprecedented and dramatic war against criminal organizations and political corruption, and this in one of the most corrupt democracies in Europe. Their lead has been taken up in France and Spain, and their actions studied by colleagues as far away as Japan and Argentina. Unexpectedly, the Italian state has produced and allowed space for a group of public servants who have earned admiration on a global scale.

The results of the 2008 Italian general election were welcomed by many as the ‘sunrise of the Third Republic’, heralding a new political system which would emerge from a comprehensive constitutional reform agreed between the main parties of government and opposition. The party system now looks significantly different from that (or those) of the ‘Second Republic’. In particular, the disappearance of the radical left from Parliament and a clear reduction in the number of parties are the main factors underpinning optimistic predictions about a possible compromise on constitutional reform. Drawing on Sartori's classic work as well as on more recent conceptualisations of party systems, this article analyses the evolution of the Italian party system over the medium and long term. It is cautious, if not pessimistic, about the prospects for reform. High levels of polarisation, stemming from different conceptions of democracy maintained by the two main parties, can be expected to hinder bipartisan reform. In particular, the figure of Berlusconi appears to represent both the cornerstone of the ‘reconstructed’ party system and the main obstacle to a widely agreed re-drafting of the Constitution.

Within a few months of the second Prodi government taking office in 2006, the Interior Minister, Giuliano Amato, reignited the ongoing debate on immigration, social integration, nationality and citizenship in Italy by launching the government's proposed reform of the law on citizenship. This article examines the implications of the reform and the debate it has provoked among the political parties in Italy in the context of the broader political discussion that has developed in Italy since the 1990s regarding immigration control, social integration and multiculturalism. The article sheds light on the way in which themes such as ‘multiculturalism’, ‘integration’ and ‘citizenship’ are conceptualised by political actors in Italy, and the way in which discussion of these themes relates to the broader political strategies and trajectories followed by these actors.