This study, first published in 1981, focuses on a single region of Italy - Tuscany, and examines the internal and external relationships of the parties, their evolution and their roles in the years 1975-1980. This volume has a particular importance due to the questioning of many previously held assumptions of the country's party system in the light of political and socio-economic change during the 1970's. This title will be of interest to students of European politics.

Coalitional behaviour is central to the Italian system of government but has been largely neglected by research. As a result, coalitions in post-war Italy have been viewed as simply unstable, short-lived and incohesive. In this book, the author corrects this one-sidedness by analysing Italian coalition politics as a continuous and dynamic process. His comprehensive, interpretative approach takes account of other new developments in coalition studies and relates his subject both to the literature on Italian politics and to the comparative study of party systems in liberal democracies. An introductory section places Italian coalitional behaviour in a theoretical and comparative context. This inductive framework is then used as a reference for examining the historical, institutional, motivational, internal, socio-political andenvironmental dimensions of the phenomenon.

The analysis of party systems in Western Europe has long constituted a major focus of concern in comparative political science. Now for the first time, many of the classic writings in this field have been collected into a single volume. The collection contains seminal writings by Weber, Neumann, Duverger, Kirchheimer, Daalder, Rokkan, and Sartori, as well as a selection from the more recent debates on changes in European party systems, including the contributions of Pedersen, Wolinetz, and Inglehart. The writings cover the development, stabilization, and transformation of party systems and include some of the key analyses which have sought to distinguish between different types of party systems.

A concise history of Italy from the fall of the Roman empire in the west to the present day.

This title was first published in 2000: A guide to the changing place of political parties within the Italian political system, seeking to shed light on how the parties operate and their role in the country's politics. Starting from a recognition of the traditional centrality of parties in Italian political life, the book's main focus is on the consequences and causes of the transformation in the party system which began to unfold from 1989 onwards. Arguing that the latter has its roots in the specific choices made by the traditional parties as they attempted to adapt to change in their electoral environment, the book then proceeds to examine what effects the changing party system is having on such traditional, "party-driven" features of Italian politics such as "sottogoverno" and "lotizzazione" and on the functioning of such institutions as parliament and the executive. The book concludes by attempting to assess whether parties are still central to political and civil society or whether their role has diminished in importance.

This book explores the political uses of Italy's antique past in the early nineteenth century, tracing how anti-romanism was transformed into a pillar of the nation-building process. It demonstrates the pivotal role played by this ancient heritage in the formation of modern Italian national identity.

This book, first published in 1987, analysed the state and changing nature of political opposition in Western Europe at the time. For each country covered, it discusses the concept of opposition and the approach adopted by opposition parties. It explores the institutional framework that was in place at the time, the electoral support for opposition, attitudes towards opposition and the criteria for the success of opposition parties. It shows how opposition had changed in nature as a result of both voter re-alignments and also because some interest groups have engaged directly in opposition activities, rather than working through opposition parties as was done previously, thereby increasing the scope of extra parliamentary opposition. Opposition is a fundamental element in democratic politics, and this book therefore throws considerable light on the whole range of political activity in the countries covered. This title will be of interest to students of politics.

A systematic comparison of three cases of democratization and regime transformation in Europe since 1945, this book highlights diversities of historical context

This book represents the first systematic research by a social scientist on the radical right-wing movements in Italy since 1945. During the heyday of right-wing violence between 1969 and 1980, street aggressions, attacks, and murders were commonplace. These bloody episodes were assumed to be the work of fanatical bands of "political soldiers" and urban warriors loosely controlled by secret services and other covert groups, which used them as part of a "strategy of tension" pursued in domestic and international circles. Franco Ferraresi here acknowledges that these rightist groups were in fact permitted a certain amount of freedom, and even in some cases actually aided, in the hope that revulsion at terrorist tactics would have the effect of mobilizing public opinion in favor of existing political arrangements. However, he also studies the extent to which they operated as autonomous units, while he carefully considers the political heritage, the doctrines, and the ideology that motivated them. With the decline of violent activity on both extremes of the political spectrum in the early 1980s, the theory and practice so comprehensively discussed by Ferraresi seemed to have entered a dormant stage. Ferraresi, however, places in context the recent resurgence of neo-fascist forces in Italy, and of the so-called New Right throughout Europe, together with the rise of fundamentalism in many parts of the world.