The Year before the Elections

Political Geography, 2003

This paper explores the Holy Year (Jubilee) held in Rome in 2000 in the context of debates about the global nature of cities. It argues that the event clarified the importance of 'Rome' to powerful political actors, which crudely correspond to the left-right division of post-war Italian politics, with the Vatican an important player in negotiating this divide. However, it is suggested that the spatial reach of these actors is uneven, yet that both exploit the 'global' event as a means of expanding their scalar power. Through a discussion of four aspects of the event-the nature of Rome as a capital city, the role of the mayor, Francesco Rutelli, the Gay Pride march that took place during the Holy Year, and the urban planning debates that surrounded its staging-the politicisation and scalar politics of Rome are elaborated. 

2016

This article aims to correlate the political rather than the pastoral action of Cardinal Camillo Ruini with the rise and consolidation of the politician Silvio Berlusconi from 1994 to 2007, set in the context of the major changes that occurred in the Catholic Church and in Italian republican politics during the 1980s and 1990s. The main theme is an ‘instrumental interaction’ between the two systems, Ruinismo and Berlusconismo, which only coincided at the level of political opportunity and gave rise to important synergies between two men who otherwise had nothing in common.

Italian Politics, 2006

Arturo Carlo Jemolo wrote Church and State during the Last Hundred Years in 1948. Jemolo, an insightful scholar of a relationship that has been scrutinized from all angles, continually updated his "long-seller," publishing fresh editions at various points. It was even reprinted after his death. By this time, historiographical knowledge of the single segments of that experience had increased in significant ways. Yet there is one reason in particular that explains this book's resistance to both the progress of time and advances in research and illustrates why it still deserves our attention today. Jemolo had intuited the broad chronological dimension that was and still remains indispensable in order to understand the relationship between church and state in Italy. If we did not precisely place the phenomena on a wide parabola, we would, in fact, risk confusing episodes with tendencies, outcomes with processes-and, in the end, become prisoners (if I may pun on the subtitle of the newspaper Osservatore Romano) of a "political and religious daily" life in which the ephemeral becomes memorable, and vice versa. Ever more so today, we need to proceed with caution in evaluating the aspects of the life of the Catholic Church that significantly influenced the course of Italian politics during 2005. The list of memorabilia should be sorted according to less spontaneous criteria than those that normally govern the daily news. Above all, we should at least attempt to reposition the processes in motion in a broader framework, which, Notes for this chapter begin on page 198.

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2016

This editors' introduction opens a special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies on the topic of 'Mapping Contemporary Catholic Politics in Italy'. It briefly identifies the political, sociological and ideational changes that have occurred in Catholic politics since the collapse of the Democrazia Cristiana party, and introduces the contributions to the special issue, highlighting the common threads and the important divergences in their analyses.

Journal of Modern Italian Studies 18:3, 2013

This special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies takes Jürgen Habermas's landmark analysis of the modern public sphere as its point of departure for exploring the Italians' historical relation to democracy. The introduction first sketches the innovative dimensions of Habermas's effort to ground the legitimacy of modern democracy in the open, reasoned dialogue of an independent public opinion. It then raises questions about the status of the public sphere in contemporary Italy, especially in light of the prolonged prominence of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at the summit of governmental power. In this context, the emergence, development and historical specificity of Italy's democratic public arena and its institutions need to be interrogated. The introduction provides an overview of the perspectives and insights offered by this issue's participants on the different aspects of the Italian public sphere. It also begins to assess the limitations as well as potential of the Italians' commitment to democracy.

2004

Choice Reviews Online, 2016

2021

In Pier Giorgio Ardeni's last work, the author proposes an analysis of the success of populism in relation to the level of inequalities, identified as the main propulsive of the growth of consensus among populist actors on the Italian scene. The proposed approach is multidisciplinary in nature and tries to integrate socioeconomic analysis with political analysis to offer a exhaustive explanation of the populist success in Italy. The hypothesis advance is that, as discontent, social unrest and levels of inequality growth, populism strengthens (see Rosanvallon, 2017) until it reaches positions of power. The originality of the work is tied not only to the theoretical hypothesis, but also to the methodology adopted: for the empirical verification, the author proceeded to trace the socio-demographic and economic profiles of the inhabitants of the lower territorial levels, that is the municipalities, taking as reference the ISTAT data coming from the registry offices to intersect them with the electoral results. The aim is to shed light on the connection between unequal income distribution, territorial gaps and voting behavior in the different areas of the country. In the first chapter of the work, attention is focused on the historical reconstruction of the underlying causes of the increase in inequalities in Italy. After the economic boom that culminated in the early 1990s (see Toniolo, 2013), the Italian economy underwent a sudden slowdown, until the recession of the 2000s during which real per capita income produced returned to the levels of twenty precedent years. The survival of Italian companies, over the years, has increasingly been tied to a progressive decrease in wages rather than to a series of product and process innovations-stimulated by public and private investmentscapable of increasing the added value of production (see Montoroni, 2000; Felice, 2005; Carreras and Felice, 2010) and the total factor productivity (TFP, indicator that measures the degree of economic efficiency of the system in it's complex). Furthermore, growing inequality has been accompanied by a reduction in social mobility (see Lipset and Bendix, 1991; Sorokin, 1998; Breen and Breen, eds. 2004) and class mobility, elements that contribute to the widening of social gaps that pockets of discontent are swelling. Another central theme of the first chapter is that concerning education. The author highlights, based on the last OECD data, that Italy has a low level of qualified and specialized education compared to the average of European countries. The percentage of people with only a primary or lower secondary school certificate is around 40%, only Spain and Portugal have higher figures. Tertiary education is achieved by only 17.7% of Italians, compared with a European average of 33.4% and an OECD average of 36.7%. On the basis of what is expressed in the report, it also emerges that Italy is one of Work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non commercial-Share alike 3.0 Italian License