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Social Structure and Political Competition: The Italian Case

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GalliGiorgio and PrandiAlfonso, Patterns of Political Participation in Italy. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1970, 364 pp., $15.00.
TarrowSidney G., Peasant Communism in Southern Italy. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1967, 389 pp., $8.75.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Alan Zuckerman
Alan Zuckerman
Affiliation:
Brown University
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Extract

With the end of the Fourth French Republic and the apparently effective performance of the Fifth Republic, France no longer provides an obvious touchstone for studies of “unstable” democracies. Perhaps as a result of the search for another such example, there has been an increase in American scholarly interest in Italy. Recent research—when combined with the studies of LaPalombara, Barnes, and Zariski, and with the studies conducted by Italian political scientists—provides a fund of organized and readily available information which may be used to test both general hypotheses and specific ones about Italian politics.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , April 1972 , pp. 428 - 443
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1972

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References

1 Among the best recent studies of Italian politics are LaPalombara, Joseph, Interest Groups in Italian Politics (Princeton 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barnes, Samuel J., Party Democracy: Politics in an Italian Socialist Federation (New Haven and London 1967)Google Scholar: Zariski, Raphael, “Intra-Party Conflict in a Dominant Party: The Experience of Italian Christian Democracy,” Journal of Politics, xxvii (February 1965), 3–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; LaPalombara, Joseph and Spreafico, Alberto, eds., Elezioni e comportamento politico in Italia (Milan 1963)Google Scholar; and Dogan, Mattel and Petracca, Orazio Maria, eds., Partiti politici e strutture sodali in Italia (Milan 1968)Google Scholar.

2 For an example of this kind of analysis, see Sartori, Giovanni, “European Political Parties: The Case of Polarized Pluralism,” in LaPalombara, Joseph and Weiner, Myron, eds., Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton 1966) 137–76Google Scholar.

3 The exception from this pattern was the March, 1971, withdrawal of the Republican Party's representative from the cabinet without removal of parliamentary support.

4 Alberoni, Francesco and others, L'attavista di partito (Bologna 1967)Google Scholar; Capecchi, Vittorio and others, Il comportamento elettorale in Italia (Bologna 1968)Google Scholar; Cantelli, Franca Cervellati and others, L'organizzazione partitica del PCI e della DC (Bologna 1968)Google Scholar; Brunelli, Luigi and others, La presenza sociale del PCI e della DC (Bologna 1969)Google Scholar; and Tozzi, Silvia A. and others, Il PCI e la DC nelle amministrazione locale e in Parlamento (Bologna 1970)Google Scholar.

5 For Tarrow's further development of the DC party structure in the Italian north, see his “Economic Development and the Transformation of the Italian Party System,” Comparative Politics, 1 (January 1969), 161–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 For an elaboration of the authority relations and the factional politics at the provincial and national levels of the DC, see Zuckerman, Alan S., Hierarchal Social Divisions and Political Groups: Factions in the Italian Christian Democrat Party (unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1971)Google Scholar.

7 For the questionnaire used in the Almond and Verba study, see Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Princeton 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Appendix B, 526-49. An Italian regional breakdown of the responses may be found in Zuckerman (fn. 6), chap. 4.

8 Wolf, Eric, “Kinship, Friendship, and Patron-Client Relations in Complex Societies,” in Banton, Michael, ed., The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies (London 1966) 1–22Google Scholar, provides a fine introduction to the patron-client concept.