A guest blog by Dylan Difford. Dylan is a researcher specialising in elections and voting systems, as well as a regular contributor to the Electoral Reform Society blog.
The collapse of Italy’s sixty-seventh post-war government has left the country heading towards an early election. To some British political commentators, this is further proof of the supposed inherent instability of proportional representation, even though Italian parliaments fulfil just as much of their maximum term as British parliaments (76% over the last fifty years). But any serious analysis of Italian politics over the last few decades, particularly considering its several major electoral reforms, could not come to the conclusion that it is PR that is to blame for Italy’s infamous instability.
A Brief History of Italian Politics
Post-war Italy can informally be divided into a ‘first republic’ (1948-1994) and a ‘second republic’ (1994-). During the first, the Italian Chamber of Deputies was elected using a highly proportional constituency-based List PR system with no electoral thresholds. Although this system allowed for lots of small parties to win seats, who was in government was largely restricted to half-a-dozen centrist parties, led by the dominant Christian Democrats (DC) – this was out of a desire to keep the Communists (who won 25-30% of the vote) and post-fascist MSI (5-10%) out of power.
Although few were allowed around the cabinet table and the DC were always in office, governments changed frequently – small parties had no problem quitting, and politics inside the DC was highly factional. But, in the early-’90s, the so-called ‘tangentopoli’ scandal implicated senior figures from most of the government parties in serious corruption, enabled by their hold over national and regional politics. Over the space of two years, the old party system completely disintegrated.
This sparked a widespread desire for political and electoral reform – voters wanted to be able to kick governments out of power and hoped for greater stability. A mixed-member system, nicknamed the Mattarellum, was introduced – with 75% of seats elected by First Past the Post (FPTP) and 25% by List PR. The reform did succeed in creating a more bipolar politics – elections are now largely fought between a left-of-centre and a right-of-centre alliance – but it did not make the instability go away, despite the significant reduction in proportionality.
After just three elections, the Mattarellum was replaced by the Porcellum – a Majority Bonus PR system in which the winning alliance was guaranteed 54% of seats, with the rest allocated proportionally. After three elections in use, this was judged unconstitutional, replaced with the never-used Italicum (another Majority Bonus system) and then the Rosatellum – the current voting system. This is a mixed-member system where three-eighths of seats are elected by FPTP and the rest by List PR. Unlike the Scottish or German mixed systems, the number of FPTP seats won has no effect on the number of List PR seats won – the two calculations are entirely separate, creating a less proportional outcome overall.
These electoral reforms over the last thirty years, though retaining proportional elements, have all had the intent of fostering more majoritarian outcomes – indeed, Britain served as an inspiration for the Mattarellum. But greater stability has not been created, suggesting the voting system wasn’t to blame for the instability to begin with. This can easily be contrasted with New Zealand’s shift to PR in the same period, which has not made Kiwi politics more unstable by any measure.
The Causes of Instability
But if PR isn’t behind Italy’s instability, what is? Issues of corruption, widespread populism and strong regional divides have all played a part, but probably the main driver has been the political parties and their behaviour. Although there is no longer a strong Communist Party, the party system remains polarised – which makes forming a government harder. Italian parties have also repeatedly shown a willingness to resign from cabinet over what would in other countries be minor issues. When combined with poor discipline within some parties, this is not the foundation of a stable political system.
Since the collapse of the old party system, this has been compounded by few of the replacement parties really being ‘true’ political parties, with many merely serving as vehicles for a particular individual (e.g., Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia). In turn, this has encouraged more politicians to create their own parties, leading to a high number of splits and defections – in the last parliament, nearly a fifth of Deputies and Senators ended up in parties that didn’t exist at the last election.
Another key factor is the structure of Italy’s parliamentary system. Unusually, the Senate is as powerful as the Chamber of Deputies, with governments required to explicitly gain and then maintain the confidence of both houses of parliament. Some governments have collapsed because they couldn’t get confidence to start with, while losing the confidence of the Senate has been the end of several other governments (and the primary reason behind this snap election).
Italy in Comparative Perspective
Italian politics is undoubtedly not the most stable, so tends to be a go-to cherry-picked example for those who oppose a fairer voting system. But it is also massively unrepresentative in terms of established democracies that use PR when it comes to stability.
Italy might be famed for frequent changes in Prime Minister, but PR users Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands have all seen changes in Prime Minister significantly less frequently than the UK over the last fifty years, while Sweden, Denmark and New Zealand sit at roughly the same level as us.
Italy might be heading for an election eight months ahead of schedule, but Italy’s rate of early elections is actually on a par with Britain – the average parliament sitting for just three-quarters of its maximum term. Ireland and Denmark are the only western European countries with a lower term completion rate over the last fifty years.
And while Italian governments might collapse frequently, it is a clear outlier. Germany and Luxembourg have each only seen one coalition fall apart in the last fifty years, while four British governments have required snap elections because of being otherwise unable to govern. Swedish and New Zealand cabinets are also less likely to collapse than British ones.
Fundamentally, there are PR countries that have less stable politics than the UK, but there are as many where politics is more stable than in the UK, while enjoying the full benefits of a proportional system. The level of variation among PR countries (as well as among non-PR countries) means that it simply isn’t plausible to draw a causal relationship between stability and voting systems. National political culture and behaviour of political parties are far more responsible for how stable a country’s politics is.
