The evolution of the form of government in Italy
| Autor | Giovanni Di Cosimo |
| Páginas | 337-348 |
The evolution of the form of government in Italy
Giovanni Di Cosimo
1. Parliamentary government; 2. Two phases; 3. Weak rationalization; 4. Parliament and
Government; 5. Parties in transformation; 6. Alternation in Government; 7. Strengthen-
ing the Government; 8. Two scenarios
1. Parliamentary government
The Constituent Assembly opted for a form of parliamentary government.
A decisive argument put forward during the discussion in favour of the par-
liamentary system was the concern over an excessive concentration of pow-
er. The wish not to repeat the experience of the fascist regime as well as the
veil of ignorance regarding the result of the political elections that were to
be held on 18th April, 1948 led the political forces to prefer a parliamentary
government in which the executive and legislative branches were bound by
a relationship of trust as this was thought to best safeguard the losers.1 The
adoption of the symmetric bicameral system that assigns the same powers to
the two chambers can also be ascribed to this line of reasoning.
Similar concerns conditioned the choice of electoral regulations and led to
of power between the parties decided by the electorate, unlike the majoritar-
ian systems that reward the political forces that emerge as winners at the
polls. Even the decision to introduce a new level of decentralized government,
halfway between the State and the local administrative bodies (communes
concentration of power. In fact, the legislative function was distributed upon
the centre-periphery axis, albeit in a rather unequal way.
In short, the Constituent Assembly steered towards institutional solu-
tions that focused on the balanced distribution of power regarding the form
of government (parliamentary), the form of state (regional) and the electoral
law (proportional representation).2 As we shall see, this orientation seems,
1 Paladin (2004) 61.
2 The principal concern of the Constituent Assembly was “to guarantee a balance in
public powers, above all preventing the predominance of the executive in the system which
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