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Electoral reforms in Italy: the continuing quest for stability and proportionality

Wahlrechtsreformen in Italien: Die anhaltende Suche nach Stabilität und Proportionalität

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Abstract

The article examines the ongoing search in Italy for electoral rules that both ensure the proportionality and provide reliable majorities for stable governments. The article shows that despite multiple changes to electoral law, this goal has not yet been achieved, which is why electoral reforms remain on the agenda of Italian politics. Furthermore, the paper explores the question of whether the problems of lack of stability and proportionality in Italy can be solved by electoral regulation changes at all. Rather, the article identifies causes in the political culture and party system that lie outside the scope of formal electoral law changes. Until these causes are addressed, the prognosis for an electoral reform that could last for several electoral periods is very unfavourable.

Der Artikel untersucht die anhaltende Suche Italiens nach Wahlregeln, die sowohl die Proportionalität sicherstellen als auch verlässliche Mehrheiten für stabile Regierungen gewährleisten. Der Artikel zeigt, dass dieses Ziel trotz mehrfacher Änderungen des Wahlrechts noch nicht erreicht wurde, weshalb Wahlreformen weiterhin auf der Tagesordnung der italienischen Politik stehen. Darüber hinaus geht der Artikel der Frage nach, ob die Probleme der mangelnden Stabilität und Proportionalität in Italien überhaupt durch Änderungen der Wahlordnung gelöst werden können. Vielmehr identifiziert der Artikel Ursachen in der politischen Kultur und im Parteiensystem, die außerhalb des Rahmens formaler Wahlrechtsänderungen liegen. Solange diese Ursachen nicht angegangen werden, ist der Ausblick auf eine Wahlrechtsreform, die über mehrere Wahlperioden Bestand hat, eher pessimistisch.

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Notes

  1. All German and Italian quotations in this article have been translated into English.

  2. “Ideal” in the sense that, as already mentioned, the rules lead to the truest possible reflection of the political preferences of (or rather: within) the electorate in the distribution of seats in the parliamentary chambers and, at the same time, to stable majorities (see Zaccone 2017, p. 324; Capuano 2012, p. 29). It means also that the regulations are recognised as widely as possible across party lines and they are regarded as legitimate and fair, and that they stand up to scrutiny by the Constitutional Court as well.

  3. The period after the Second World War in Italy can be divided into the so-called First and Second Republic. While the First Republic began with the entry into force of the Italian Constitution in 1947, its end is usually dated to 1992, which also marks the transition to the Second Republic. At the beginning of the 1990s, major corruption scandals (tangentopoli) were uncovered in the course of investigations (mani pulite). This led to the end of the previous party system and the development of a new one. Since transition to the Second Republic was not accompanied by a fundamental constitutional revision, the designation of a Second Republic is controversial (Bolgherini 2018, p. 32; see also Grasse 2021).

  4. This law, which was only applied in the 1953 elections, provided for a majority bonus, so that a party with over 50% of the electoral votes should receive at least 65% of the mandates (Lönne 2016a, p. 516).

  5. Preferential voting has been the subject of criticism for promoting clientilism between MPs and individual constituency groups, sometimes including organised crime (Grimm 2018, p. 185).

  6. He literally said: “I wrote the law on crimes of opinion and I am honestly proud of it, and obviously the law on self-defence. I’m a little less proud of the electoral law that will have to be rewritten. I’ll tell you frankly, I wrote it but it’s a piece of crap. A piece of rubbish that was deliberately made to make it difficult for the left and the right to come to terms with the people who are voting” (quoted from La Repubblica 2006).

  7. There were special rules for the votes of Italians living abroad, for the protection of linguistic minorities and for small regions, but for the sake of clarity we will not go into these here.

  8. Until the alignment in 2022, the possibility of different majorities was exacerbated by the different voting ages for Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

  9. These splits from the dominant centre-left party PD show how much the Italian party system is in constant transformation, to which trasformismo also contributes. Parties fragment, (re‑)merge, rename themselves, and often disintegrate again (for an overview on party development see Ignazi 2018). The political left, in particular, shows (again) a tendency towards fragmentation, which, however, also leads to attempts at mergers, after the PD was actually founded as a collective party of the left (Tedeschi 2018). But on the political right, too, the party system has changed considerably since the beginning of the Second Republic (see Grimm 2016a). Beside the two blocs, a completely new party, often classified as populist, developed with the Five Star Movement (see Biorcio and Natale 2018), although populism is neither a new phenomenon nor limited to the Five Stars (cf. Tarchi 2003).

  10. According to Mario Caciagli, switching between and splitting from parties is further encouraged by (internal) parliamentary regulations that make it easy to change parliamentary groups and give even small associations of MPs extensive rights. He therefore considers the revision of these regulations to be more promising than electoral reforms in terms of limiting the disintegration of the party system (Caciagli 2009, p. 82 f.).

  11. Think, for example, of the long duration of the formation of the government after the German 2017 election, the coalition of three parliamentary groups in the current Bundestag or the inflation of Parliament due to the overhang mandates and the necessary compensatory mandates.

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    Jan Labitzke

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Labitzke, J. Electoral reforms in Italy: the continuing quest for stability and proportionality. Z Vgl Polit Wiss 16, 405–426 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12286-022-00550-8

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