Coalitions and Inter-Party Conflicts Management: The Case of Italy

The intra-coalition conflicts management is a typical problem of coalition behaviour. These conflicts constitute a common feature of most coalition governments and in many cases they pose serious threats to the coalition’s survival. This means that parties have often to face and manage them if they do not want to put the coalition’s life too much at risk. However, in spite of its relevance, the literature, with the exception of a few remarkable works, has quite surprisingly neglected the topic. This paper aims to plug in part the gap by providing a framework for the study of inter-party conflicts management in coalition governments and, on this basis, through an empirical investigation of this process with respect to the Italian case. I want to answer, in the last resort, to the question: which factors are likely to have more impact on the nature of the process of conflict management? In the first part I give conceptual definitions of conflict and inter-party conflict as social and political relations. Subsequently I present a theoretical framework in order to situate inter-party conflicts management in the broader context of coalition politics and to propose a useful tool for its analysis in comparative perspective. The second part of the paper is mainly empirical. I shall apply the framework for a research on three Italian coalition cabinets between 1996 and 2005. In particular, I deal with the Prodi I (1996-1998); the D’Alema I (1998-1999); and the second Berlusconi cabinets. I seek to single out the most important features of inter-party conflicts from the viewpoint of their management, namely the actors involved, their role and the arenas used by the parties to cope with this problem. Some concluding remarks try to advance new theoretical inferences and hypotheses about the main research question and to show new research outlooks.