Governments, Policy Space and Party Positions in the Italian Parliament (1996-2001)

Through a content analysis of parliamentary debate on votes of investiture of four governments (1996-2001), it is provided a survey of the political themes tackled by the Italian parliamentary leaders and by the government incumbents. Both the left-to-right policy distances and the inter-coalition policy distances are still relatively high, notwithstanding some recent novelties of the Italian politics (party system change and realignment, electoral reform, bipolarization of the party system). Beside, the data enlighten the peculiar Italian version of the bipolar politics, labelled “polarized bipolarism” and featured by confrontation between opposite coalitions in the electoral arena but by multiparty dynamics in the parliamentary arena.