Surviving Without Governing: The Italian Parties in Parliament

By Giuseppe Di Palma

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520321410

Giuseppe Di Palma

Enter the Author Bio(s) here.

Book preview

Surviving Without Governing

Surviving

Without

Governing

THE ITALIAN PARTIES IN PARLIAMENT

Giuseppe Di Palma

Published under the auspices of the

Institute of International Studies

University of California (Berkeley)

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright© 1977 by

The Regents of the University of California

ISBN 0-520-03195-4

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-46035

Printed in the United States of America

A mio padre

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Premise

I The Performance of the System: A Theoretical View

II Legislative Behavior: Effective or Ineffective?

III The Uncertain Compromise: Parliament’s Decisional Rules

IV Politicians in Parliament: The Political Culture of Italian Legislators

V Parliamentary Procedures and Legislative Outputs

VI Government and Party System: A Sartorian View

VII Centrism, Its Uses and Its Present Crisis: Which Way Italy?

APPENDIX Classifying Legislative Proposals

Index

Acknowledgments

The brevity of these acknowledgments has a reason. So many individuals and organizations have helped that I have opted for a highly selective list. Because money and logistics are essential to sound scholarship, I would first like to thank the Institute of International Studies (Berkeley) for financial and clerical assistance and Professor Alberto Spreafico, for hosting me at the Comitato per le Scienze Politiche e Sociali in Rome. Equally invaluable has been the cooperation of Professor Vittorio Mortara and Professor Franco Cazzola—they amply discussed with me their research on the Italian Parliament and made available their data. Surviving in Rome and in the corridors of Parliament was made easier by many. Dr. Antonio Maccanico, Secretary General of the Chamber of Deputies, opened doors for me and taught me a few things about the ways of parliamentary politics. Dr. Aiassa, of the Christian Democratic parliamentary group, the entire staff of the Communist group, and the Honorable Raffaele Di Primio, of the Socialist group, gave generous assistance in the organization of the interviews. The Honorable Di Primio was especially kind and took personal interest in the intellectual aspects of the research. Professor Ignazio Ughi and his students at the Istituto di Sociologia Luigi Sturzo provided assistance in the various phases of the research, and so did Dr. Sergio Lieto of the Sergio Lieto & Associates. Francine and Vittoria Di Palma, my wife and daughter respectively, held everything together by just being there and liking it.

Back in Berkeley, two years and a few hundred pages later, the finished manuscript, expertly prepared by Bojana Ristich, has greatly benefited, I hope, from the friendly readings of several colleagues. On the American side I would like in particular to mention Robert Putnam, Aaron Wildavsky, Ernst Haas and

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Nelson Polsby. On the Italian side I should mention Giovanni Sartori and Gianfranco Pasquino. To Joseph LaPalombara, who straddles the two cultures with greater zest than anybody else, I owe special thanks. Both in Rome, where we spent a year together, and back in the United States, he has been prodigal of counsel and friendship as only a son of the generous Terra d’Abruzzo can be.

The reader should heed the cautionary note that I am ultimately accountable for this book, its defects and virtues. Qui si parrà la mia nobilitate.

Berkeley, March 1976 G. D. P.

Premise

In July 1973, as I started drafting this book, the Honorable Mariano Rumor, a prominent leader of Italy’s Christian Democratic party, formed the country’s thirty-first government since the war. The government’s program was simple and unprecedented: to break the spiral of executive instability, to last until the parliamentary elections four years later. In March of 1976, as this book goes to press, Italy is ruled by yet another government (the country’s thirty-fourth), headed by yet another Catholic leader. In the space of two and one half years, the clear defeat of the Christian Democratic party in the divorce referendum of May 1974 and the spectacular and unexpected success of the Communist party in the local elections of last June—one-third of the votes, almost as many as the Christian Democratic party—have for the first time seriously challenged Christian Democracy’s unbroken rule. In the space of two and one half years, the country has but strengthened its reputation as Europe’s grande malade. The symptoms are there for all to see, and they are more onimous than ever. They spell social unrest, economic collapse, political and administrative ineffectiveness.

Beginning in 1969, Italy has known the most prolonged and sustained period of social conflict, turmoil, and even violence in its postwar history. While in other Western countries the beginning of the seventies has witnessed some social retrenchment, in Italy unrest has continued and even intensified. Labor disputes and strikes have become the order of the day, and have placed the country first among European Economic Community countries in terms of lost working days.1 The reasons go beyond the swift upsurge in the power of established labor organizations in the last seven years. As unions have expanded their scope of action and strengthened their bargaining power, they have also been faced with serious problems of organization, discipline, and containment. Among the countless strikers are not only factory workers but doctors, nurses, garbage collectors, civil servants, teachers, university professors, court clerks, pilots and airport employees, bus conductors, social workers, building-trade workers, gas station attendants, city employees, store clerks, concierges, gravediggers, museum personnel, hotel employees, railroad workers. At times strikes and disputes have been organized and channeled by unions; at times they have run contrary to union control and have been exploited to challenge responsible union leadership, to spread dissension in union ranks and tension in the country, and to impose the unprincipled economic demands of narrow service categories.

While labor has been active, students have not been dormant. Here again Italy has remained the only Western country where the student agitations of the sixties have become a permanent and routinized phenomenon. Further, the universities have not been the only places where sit-ins, occupations of buildings, confrontations between student factions and between students and the authorities, have spelled out permanent agitation. High schools, at least in the large cities, have often been in the forefront.

Needless to say, labor and student disputes have offered— often unwittingly—invaluable arenas of confrontation for extremist groups and groupuscules of the extraparliamentary variety. And with the groupuscules have often come violence and blood, at times unanticipated and overreactive, at times—more ominously—planned or provoked artfully to sow tensions and fear. Such violence has very often spread well beyond the geographical confines of school and factory grounds. It has spilled onto the streets of Italian cities. It has taken its toll in deaths and injuries among workers, students, policemen, among innocent bystanders, shoppers, and travelers. Public offices, banks, and trains have been bombed; so have peaceful rallies, union and political party headquarters, as well as the houses of political opponents. And when local political and social conditions have favored it, entire cities—as different as Milan in the industrial North and Reggio Calabria in the core of the impoverished South—have been engulfed by violence and brought to a standstill for months at a time. In such a climate, the murder of public officials and defenseless political opponents—often no more than young activists—becomes an accepted practice.

Where such violence ceases to be political and becomes common criminality is anybody’s guess. Morally the distinction is not always worth drawing, and organizationally it is a known fact that the ransom kidnappings and bank robberies, reported almost every day in the Italian press, serve in many cases to replenish the coffers of a number of terrorist organizations. Thus the continual calls for law and order and for a determined fight against political terrorism and common criminality, coming from all parties, is no sham. It may be self-serving and one-sided—as it often fails to recognize that most violence, especially in its bloodier aspects of mass terrorism, comes from the extreme right—but it reveals a clear and imminent danger. Violence has not brought down the system yet, but is is fast eroding it, the more so as violence occurs in a climate of economic and politico- institutional crisis.

Economically, Italy presents a most explosive mix of soaring inflation and economic recession unprecedented in the postwar period. Among the significant factors of inflation is the sudden and dramatic increase in the cost of labor that followed, at the end of the sixties, the rapid expansion in economic output and productivity in the late fifties and early sixties. The ensuing fall of profits and the recession are supported by the failure of the economy first to anticipate and then to counteract rising labor costs by modernizing and rationalizing, by eliminating the waste and hidden costs of traditional productive structures, by streamlining systems of marketing and distribution, by isolating essentially parasitic and unproductive economic forces, and in sum by creating a social infrastructure capable of supporting sustained economic expansion. In other words, though the Italian economy has grown fast, it has grown haphazardly, without coordination, without planning its future capacities, and by containing labor.

Today’s inflation and recession are largely the product of such improvident behavior. While salaries and wages increase, skyrocketing inflation undoes the gains. Plants work at much less than their productive capacity, not only because of strikes but also because of lack of a market and lack of business confidence. Inappropriate lending policies, high operational costs, indebtedness, lack of confidence, have substantially cut industrial investments and self-financing. The fear of collapse and the lack of resources to stem it are very real for many firms. Beyond this is the fear that, because of its economic and social crisis, Italy is failing to keep up with its partners in the European Economic Community. Many economic operators, technocrats, and politicians are indeed beginning to ask themselves whether, a few years from now, Italy will still be a legitimate member of an expanding Continental Europe or part of a more depressed Mediterranean area. To complicate matters, the answer hinges not only on how the country will deal with the present economic problems but also on whether it will eventually cope with its oldest, most serious, and still unresolved social and economic problem—the problem of the underdeveloped South. Here, little satisfactory progress has been made; here, too, is a crucial test of Italy’s partnership in Europe; here, the next few years will be decisive.

The remedies to economic stagnation and crisis go well beyond the business cycle and require the active involvement of government and politics. But politics in Italy gives no fewer reasons for concern than society and economy, and the record of the past does not speak well for the future. Despite thirty years of unbroken Christian Democratic hegemony, Italian governments have compiled an embarrassing and sorrowful record of postponements and omissions. Not even the much heralded entry of the Socialist party in the government coalitions, in the now distant 1963, altered the trend. In point of fact, the event has best served to reveal the inability of Italian governments to respond to the expectations of a rapidly changing country. The Center- Left—that is, the coalition of Christian Democrats and Socialists, together with the minor Social Democratic and Republican parties—has governed Italy almost uninterruptedly for twelve years. Its program of structural reforms was meant to combine emphasis on welfare, social justice, and the elimination of traditional privilege with an effort to rationalize the economy through planning, modernization of the social and economic infrastructures, and support for the advanced sectors of the economy. But, as cabinets followed cabinets (fourteen between December 1963 and today), government programs went sour; major legislation was never enacted or backfired; social and economic malaise mounted. The Socialist party, a party of long-standing Marxist traditions, closely allied until the fifties with the Communist party, failed to obtain electoral reward for its change of strategy and became increasingly restive in its new government role. Meanwhile, the Communist party steadily if slowly continued to gain votes through the decade, threatening to reach the 30 percent mark, and the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano made electoral payday of the expanding social malaise. Today, after a brief and unsuccessful return to more moderate coalitions in 1972-73, after the personal defeat of the Christian Democrats in the divorce referendum, after the Communists have already passed the 30 percent mark, the survival of the Center-Left, once considered an irreversible formula, is more than ever in doubt. The present Italian governments can no more cure themselves than they can the social and economic malaise of the country. What lies ahead?

This book cannot possibly predict within any specified degree of accuracy how the question will be answered. Further, when it comes to the future of a whole country, any prediction may seem, if unfulfilled, sorrowfully disappointing. But the book can define and scrutinize the performance of the Italian political system since the war, and can examine its wider repercussions on Italian society. In particular, the book focuses on the operation of what is still a crucial structure for the articulation of issues and for their authoritative management—the Italian Parliament. It is a study of Parliament’s legislative performance and of the way in which performance is hampered by an unresolved question: the question of who governs, the question of how majority and opposition should relate to each other. But before defining the goals, concepts, and procedures of the research, it may be well to take a step back. Having described the syndrome of social, economic, and political crisis in today’s Italy, it may be worth discussing its causes. Is there an order within the syndrome and, if so, what are the imputed relations? As we proceed, the political focus, of our research will be justified.

One final cautionary note. The syndrome presented above may appear to some excessively pessimistic and possibly off the mark. After all, Italy has successfully and swiftly reconstructed after the ravages of the war. After all, Italy has grown faster than most of its European partners and, from being an essentially agricultural society, it has become in a few years the seventh industrial power in the world. After all, the signs of prosperity and modernity are there for all to see. After all, the country has shown a significant civic growth, especially during the current years of turmoil. The introduction of divorce, the reform of the family, penal, and military codes, the imminent liberalization of abortion and drug laws, the democratization of school structures to permit parent and student participation, the spreading of grass-root neighborhood committees largely independent of parties, the greater awareness of issues that affect people’s life, the greater readiness to experiment with new forms of participation, are but some examples of the rapid secularization of Italian society and of its accomplishments in matters of civil liberties and civic involvement. After all, it may finally be said, Italy has a reputation for getting itself disentangled from situations deemed hopeless by others, and the restraint and awareness with which many parties are behaving, signally the Communist party, may speak to the point.

My answer to these assorted doubts is that establishing the nature and implications of the syndrome and, finally, its correctives, is the purpose of the book. One should, however, bear in mind two things. First, many crises that often usher in collapse are indeed crises of growth. There is little doubt, for instance, that Weimar showed many symptoms of expansion and of promising cultural growth just before its crisis and demise. Second, most Italians, politicians and citizens alike, believe in the syndrome of malaise. And what one believes to be real may be real in its consequences; witness W. I. Thomas or Luigi Pirandello, depending on one’s reference point.

1 Data from the European Economic Community show that Italy accounts for the following percentages of working hours lost in all countries of the Community: 78.3 percent in 1969, 54.0 percent in 1970, 35.0 percent in 1971, 38.0 percent in 1972, 54.2 percent in 1973, 45.0 percent in 1974.

I

The Performance of the System:

A Theoretical View

THE SYNDROME AS A PHENOMENON OF

WESTERN DEMOCRACIES

A number of alternative or complementary explanations have been offered for the syndrome of Italian malaise presented in the premise. One thesis at least implicit in much commentary on the events of the last years is that Italy shares in the same malaise that in the past decade has pervaded practically all highly industrial democracies. First, when it comes to social and political unrest, nowadays one cannot ignore the power of demonstration effects across countries. Because a student sit-in took place today in Berkeley, it may take place tomorrow in Pisa; because a politician was kidnapped today in Bonn, another may be kidnapped tomorrow in Rome. Second, growing economic interdependence and the destabilization of international economic equilibria are at the roots of many of the economic problems of much of the Western world. It is international economic stagnation that accounts for the serious decline in Italian exports, investments, and profits. It is the oil crisis that accounts for half of Italy’s balance- of-payments deficit. Italy in sum is not alone in suffering from the consequences of a worldwide economic crisis. Third, rapid economic transformation coupled with and most probably causing a redefinition and re-ordering of social priorities and issues is exercising everywhere unexpected strains on social, economic, and political institutions. Herein, in Italy, and everywhere else, lies the cause of much turmoil and political ineffectiveness. Herein lies the syndrome.

This thesis recommends itself in many ways, but it does not bar, indeed it already implies, another course. For, if the syndrome is common to many countries, it also stands to reason that its origins, as well as its evolution and cure, also depend on local social and political circumstances. It may be true that the driving vectors shared by all Western democracies are the vectors of post-industrialism. But they operate in countries at different stages of economic development, with different economic and social structures, and different political institutions and cultures as well. And, if the syndrome expresses a clash between old and new, it stands to reason that its origins and nature vary according to what exactly is old in each country. It also stands to reason that its evolution and outcome will be determined by the local ability of social, economic, and political structures to respond, accommodate, and anticipate.

THE SYNDROME AND ITALIAN SOCIETY

Our investigation of the syndrome must therefore begin by searching within Italy. Here a first set of explanations of the syndrome becomes relevant, all of them centered around the way in which the economic miracle took place in the country between the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties. They emphasize the fact that the miracle took place: (1) while extensive areas of underdevelopment and traditional privilege survived; (2) by relying initially on labor containment; (3) and without a needed modernization in the infrastructure of social services. These features are responsible for the fact that Italy is, with England, the industrial country most grievously affected by the present international crisis, and they augur poorly for the future.

First, the miracle has occurred in the North, in the urban areas, in the industrial sectors, and much less in the South, in the countryside, in agriculture. Hence the gap between poles has increased; witness the millions of able-bodied peasants and Southerners who have flocked in recent years to the cities and the North, depopulating the countryside and leaving behind the old and marginals. To give just some figures, according to the last national census the population actively occupied in agriculture has decreased from 42.6 percent in 1951 to 29.1 percent in 1961 and to 17.3 percent in 1971. This means that of one hundred persons actively employed in agriculture in 1961, forty-three have left. It may be argued by some that the existence of poles of development is natural and beneficial for economic growth, but the point is that it is not beneficial in the syndrome. For one thing, the widening of the gap and the survival of extensive areas of underdevelopment within an expanding society signify the growing of tensions between development and underdevelopment. Tensions manifest themselves in local populistic uprisings against the center—as have occurred in some Southern cities—in the growth of right-wing appeals in retarded areas, and in increasing pressures by traditional interests to preserve their privileges in the face of change. For another thing, conflict due to traditional economic inequality survives in the areas of underdevelopment. On both counts, the country is overloaded with the accumulation of old and new conflicts.

The second feature of the economic miracle reveals that the syndrome it triggers is not just a natural tension between old and new. Indeed, the success of the miracle owes much to traditional policies of labor containment and to the entrepreneurship of small labor-intensive industries. It is the failure of these strategies at the end of the sixties, compounded by the international crisis, that also accounts for the present economic and social predicament. In short, the miracle relied on an oversupply of cheap labor, poorly protected by weak labor organizations.¹ Hence productivity increased and expansion took place till the early sixties not so much by technological innovation and industrial restructuring as by the exploitation and rationalization of labor resources. The process especially assisted small and medium labor-intensive industries, heavily favored by an expanding foreign demand for semidurable and mass-consumption goods. These industries played a crucial role in sustaining the miracle. While employment expanded, new workers were almost totally absorbed by small and medium industries—which still remain the backbone of the industrial system—or they replaced women as well as older workers. While productivity increased drastically, labor costs remained essentially the same.

But these improvident policies of labor containment and their short-range industrial effects came to an end abruptly with the increasing social and economic militancy of the unions and with the strengthening of their bargaining power, two developments which are here to stay. The fall in industrial profits and investments and the ensuing slump stem originally from the tremendous increase in labor costs, which makes Italian firms no longer competitive with firms of advanced industrial countries.² Labor costs also account for inflation, which was originally neither imported nor triggered by internal demands,³ and which soon became higher than in most other industrial countries, even before the oil crisis. At the same time, though the economic crisis keeps escalating, labor militancy remains undaunted. Though willing, as of the fall of 1975, to discuss what employers now perceive as urgent problems of industrial restructuring and labor mobility, unions are not ready to sacrifice, for the sake of solving these problems, either wages or full and stable employment. Thus the economic miracle has generated its own downfall and activated a social and economic malaise that the country cannot treat.

The third feature of the economic miracle is that the miracle was largely based on an expansion in the production and marketing of goods for individual consumption. It did not involve expansion and rationalization in the supply and delivery of social services. Therefore, as masses of new urban dwellers have flocked to the cities, and as the demands of an expanding economy have otherwise multiplied, the infrastructure of collective services, limited to begin with, has burst at the seams. New residents have found the cities dismal and inhospitable, while old residents have watched hopelessly the decay of their familiar environment. And if appropriate social infrastructures do not exist, no amount of increasing individual income can buy better public education, better transportation, better and cheaper housing, more efficient welfare and health services. Here, too, are the causes of social unrest. Here, too, organized labor has been extremely vocal in demanding and obtaining a greater input. But when labor shows active interest not only in matters of wages and work conditions, but also in matters of full employment, of industrial restructuring, of economic development, of urban conditions, and of social services, its counterpart is no longer management but the government. And here the political roots of the syndrome are revealed: the counterpart does not respond. Just as government—by failing to encourage and adopt a concerted set of industrial policies for development—has been unable to give a different direction to the economic miracle and to anticipate its defects, so it is now unable to cure the present malaise.

THE SYNDROME AND ITALIAN POLITICS

In the last analysis, social unrest, economic crisis, the very militancy of labor organizations, are not the result of objectively unmanageable problems but the product of government ineffectiveness. It is especially in this regard that Italy differs from other industrial countries faced with their share of social and economic problems, and it is mainly ineffectiveness that explains why in Italy the problems are so much greater than elsewhere. In Italy political ineffectiveness is not new and well precedes the rapid changes of the last ten to fifteen years. It is not the social and economic crisis, in other words, that mainly explains political ineffectiveness; but the latter that mainly sustains the former. Undoubtedly the social and economic changes of the last years have further impaired the responses of the political body. But the body was ill to begin with and contaminated society.

More important, if one is interested not only in the origins of the syndrome, but also in its evolution and outcome, one must recognize that there are few if any Western countries where politics, in fact straight party politics, as thoroughly pervades (and stalemates) every single aspect of the community as in Italy. In part as a result of decades of uninterrupted rule by the Christian Democratic party, in part as a result of enduring politico- ideological divisions, little if any that is public saves itself from the smothering embrace of politics, little if any that needs solving escapes the logic of partisan gains and losses. Radio and television are strictly controlled by the government and their offices are important prizes in the equilibrium games of government partners. Bureaucracies and public agencies are similarly colonized by parties and factions in government. Political clientelism has built a spider web of partisan alliances and dealings reaching all sectors of society. It involves party factions and cliques in all sorts of economic and social endeavors, especially those connected with the building and control of infrastructures, such as welfare, education, housing, transportation, communication, services, cooperatives, and the like. The public sector, never small in Italy to begin with, has reached proportions and scope that only socialist countries can match. In the past few years, a number of large public corporations, strong of their privileged political and financial conditions, have come to dominate the advanced sector of the economy, and therefore hold the key to the economic future of the country.4 5 In addition, wherever the government parties have not imposed their monopoly, all solutions to social needs and ills seem to revolve around which parties and ideologies should control what. The problem of effective regional development is often reduced to whether the opposition should govern in the periphery, though it cannot govern at the center. The problems of higher education often become problems of party balance between competing faculty constituencies. The problems of courtroom justice shade on whether the ideological progressivism of politically minded junior judges will break the conservative control of their seniors. And whether Parliament and government can take the country out of the impasse seems to rest on the partisan equilibrium of majority and opposition. Yet, for all its pervasiveness, politics remains unable to push the country beyond the impasse.

In sum, the key question in unraveling the syndrome is the response of politics. In what way, then, is Italian politics ineffective, and how can we show that the political system has failed in its responses? For years Italy, together with France, has been cited and studied as a typical example of ineffective performance. Indeed, after the advent of the Fifth Republic in France, Italy remained the classical contemporary paradigm. But for all the attention and agreement, most of the analysis is only inferential; that is, it does not offer much evidence of performance,® nor for that matter does it define the term and its evaluative criteria— except by vague constitutive referents, such as stability or viability. Rather, it infers performance from alleged causes, chiefly the party system, political ideology, political culture. Before proceeding with our investigation and eventually raising causal questions it is therefore necessary to define performance, to isolate the aspects relevant to us, to pinpoint the criteria for evaluation and evidence, and to explain why—having defined performance—the study will focus on the Italian Parliament. This is the object of the next two sections.

POLITICAL PERFORMANCE

The term performance refers to the execution and accomplishment of work and also, in a connotation relevant to us, to the manner and effectiveness with which something fulfills an intended task. That is, performance contains in its very definition an evaluative criterion, that of producing what is intended or expected. Performance, to put it redundantly, is effective to the extent that it produces what is intended. The point is also conveyed by rendimento, the Italian word for performance, where rendimento literally refers to what is rendered, given back, returned, yielded, in short, to outputs. We are dealing with the obvious, but the obvious is often overlooked, and the step, though small, is valuable: it begins to pinpoint the complexities we are up against. For, if performance, and namely political performance, has to do with intended outputs, there are now two things that need investigation: outputs and their intended nature. Let me put aside for a while the latter and more vexing task and focus on the former.

Output is itself a concept that needs definition and rules of evidence, so that we can recognize an output when we see one. In addition, assuming that the problem of recognition is solved, the catalogue of outputs of a political system—even at one given time—is something that at first thought staggers the imagination. No matter what notion of the political system and its limits is entertained, its activities are bound to be endless. Every day,

5. Somogyi et al., Il Parlamento Italiano 1946-1963 (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1963), pp. 281-386. For France see Nathan Leites, On the Game of Politics in France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959); Duncan McRae, Jr., Parliament, Parties, and Society in France 1946-1958 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967).

judges pass sentences, parties recruit cadres or issue position statements, government agencies approve expenditure programs, parliaments enact laws, groups vent demands in a variety of forms, politicians confer with their electors. All of these can be taken in a way as aspects of what the polity does, instances of outputs. Even were we to agree on the range of outputs to be considered and on whether they are representative of the polity’s performance, how can we possibly agree on a summary evaluation of such a variety of outputs, how can we possibly assess the overall performance of the system? The answer is that most likely we can’t, at least not until some order is given to its activities.

Fortunately a measure of order has already been provided by many scholars, beginning, to remain within the more recent literature, with the works of Gabriel Almond and David Easton.⁶ Political activities can be reduced to a few types of so-called functions typically exercised by all political systems. One advantage of this approach is that only a few separate functions rather than an inchoate range of activities need evaluation, and activities can be sampled within functions. More important, whatever the exact labeling and range of identified functions, one function emerges as central to the system, the function of rule-making. Other functions appear instrumental for evaluative purposes with respect to rule-making. If they have to do with the articulation and aggregation of demands or the political socialization and recruitment of citizens, they appear in effect as inputs within the system, to be evaluated for the way in which they interact with rulemaking. If they have to do with the implementation of rules, they are evaluated for their success in this intended task. But it is rule-making that epitomizes performance, and it is rules that represent the significant outputs of the system.

In order not to generate confusion, I should stress that the above prejudges nothing about the exact causal relations between functions. Much research in recent years, especially when dealing with foreign countries, has concentrated on the functions that precede rule-making, to the point of reducing rule-making to a simple process of translation of external inducements and pressures and of considering the institutions legally entrusted with authoritative decisions as mere sanctioners of the process.⁷ It can as well be argued, as I will throughout the book, that rule-making and the institutions formally entrusted with it are themselves largely instrumental in defining the inducements, pressures, and demands to which they respond.⁸ The point is that the distinction between functions does not establish a causal model; it simply arranges them in an ideal task-sequence so as to isolate the central function for performance evaluation. But if this function is rulemaking, and pending an appraisal of its relations to other functions, it is with rule-making that we should start. The next section will show that having chosen rule-making (and the Italian Parliament), recognizing rules is not an unmanageable problem. But let us now turn to the evaluation of performance. What follows concerns performance in democratic systems, and some adaptation would be needed to fit the nondemocratic case.

Since performance refers to the execution of intended tasks, I take the task of rule-making in democracies to be the formation of at least sufficient, that is viable, agreement around decisions. Hence, rule-making is effective to the extent that it succeeds in this task. Viability does not refer to legal requirements for making decisions binding, but to what is politically feasible, and what elites can agree upon. The definition may seem perfectly acceptable to some, for it seems in fact to go to the essence of what is meant when speaking of the instability, unviability,