ABSTRACT
Instability has been the hallmark of Italian governments. But governmental instability is made up of many factors and hides several specific elements of Italian politics, bad and good. This chapter explores the reasons why Italian governments have been unstable. From 1946 to the time of writing, June 2018, Italy has had sixty-five governments. However, there have been only twenty-nine Prime Ministers. The extremely abundant high-quality literature on coalition governments confirms that such governments are inherently less stable and less durable than one-party governments. In coalition governments, all the parties continue jockeying for visibility, in order to get better offices, to advance their policies and to demonstrate publicly how influential and indispensable they are. The several cases of long-lasting Italian governments that have nothing to envy most governments of the other European parliamentary democracies for suggest that it is necessary to look at the type of coalition in which they were embedded.
