Minority Governments Revised: The Case of Italy

Despite decades of scholarship on coalition government formation in parliamentary systems, minority governments remain a puzzling phenomenon as they seem to challenge the very same foundations upon which democracy is based. In contrast, empirical evidence show that they account for about one third of the governments that formed in European democracies in the post war period. In his path-breaking contribution, Strom (1990) selected Norway and Italy as the two case-studies worth deepening the analysis of minority government formation and termination. Despite the stability of its constitutional framework, from the 1990 onwards Italy experienced dramatic changes in the party system as well as in the electoral rules, marking a shift to what has been called the Second Republic. My contribution will focus on how these changes have affected government formation and duration, with the aim of revisiting Strom's analysis thirty years later.