Abstract
In Italy, the term ‘anomalia’ is used by critics of the Italian political system to lament the alleged lack of maturity and modernity of the country. In other countries, such as Great Britain, the United States and France, the term ‘exceptionalism’ is used to highlight, often in a complimentary way, the particularity of the country. This article reviews some of the uses of the term in Italian politics particularly with regard to the hegemony – for the first 40 years or so of the so-called First Republic – of the Christian Democratic Party and the weight of the Italian Communist Party. This tends to highlight problems of coalition-making and alternance of parties in government instead of the true ‘anomaly’, namely, the existence of an unusually strong criminal organization, the mafia or the problems affecting the Italian model of development.
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Notes
www.oecd.org/dataoecd/28/6/42672218.pdf and World Bank, Genderstats, 2004 figures see www.devdata.worldbank.org/. For Parliament 2005 figures, see data in Peter Baldwin (2009) for car theft OECD Factbook (2006) cited in Baldwin p. 81. For gender gap, see www.reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-2011/
Source: OECD figures.
OECD data quoted in Brinkley (2008). Also www.theworkfoundation.com/assets/docs/publications/41_KE_life_of_nations.pdf
See figures at Europe’s Energy Portal, www.energy.eu/
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Sassoon, D. The Italian anomaly?. Comp Eur Polit 11, 280–295 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2012.43
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2012.43