- Italy in the early Middle Ages
- Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries
- Early modern Italy (16th to 18th century)
- Revolution, restoration, and unification
- Italy from 1870 to 1945
Justice of Italy
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The Italian judicial system consists of a series of courts and a body of judges who are civil servants. Judges and prosecutors belong to the same civil service sector, and their positions are interchangeable. The judicial system is unified, with every court being part of the national network. The highest court in the central hierarchy is the Supreme Court of Cassation; it has appellate jurisdiction and gives judgments only on points of law. The 1948 constitution prohibits special courts with the exception of administrative courts and courts-martial, although a vast network of tax courts has survived from an earlier period. The administrative courts have two functions: the protection of interessi legittimi—that is, the protection of individual interests directly connected with public interests and protected only for that reason—and the supervision and control of public funds.
Administrative courts are also provided by the judicial sections of the Council of State, the oldest juridical-administrative advisory organ of government. The Court of Accounts has both an administrative and a judicial function; the latter involves primarily fiscal affairs. The Superior Council of the Magistrature, provided for by the constitution and intended to guarantee the independence and integrity of the judiciary, was formed only in 1958. It attends to the careers, assignments, and disciplining of judges. Two-thirds of its members are elected by the judges and one-third by parliament. The president and the public prosecutor of the Court of Cassation also belong to it. Elections tend to politicize the council, which has become an influential force in Italian politics.
Italian law is codified and based on Roman law, in particular as regards civil law. The codes of the kingdom of Sardinia in civil and penal affairs, derived from the Napoleonic Code, were extended to the whole of Italy when unification was achieved in the mid-19th century. In the period between World War I and II, these codes were revised. The Constitutional Court has declared a number of articles unconstitutional. The revised 1990 penal code replaced the old inquisitory system with an accusatory system akin to that of common-law countries. Besides the codes, there are innumerable statute laws that integrate the codes and regulate areas of law, such as public law, for which no codes exist.
The constitution stresses the principle that the judiciary should be independent of the legislature and the executive. For this reason, jurisdictional functions can be performed only by ordinary magistrates, and extraordinary tribunals may not be set up. Judges cannot be dismissed, they are not subject to hierarchical superiors, and their careers rest on seniority.
The organized crime group known collectively as the Mafia (though regionally recognized as the Camorra in Naples, the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria, and the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia) has a long history in Italy, particularly in Sicily, and it has followed the Italian diaspora to foreign countries, notably the United States. Nearly eliminated by Benito Mussolini during the interwar period and revived after World War II, the Mafia resurged in the mid-20th century with the rise of international drug trafficking but faced increased homeland opposition from the Italian justice system in the later years of the century. As government prosecution of its activities increased in the 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s, the Mafia struck back by assassinating magistrates and judges who had aggressively targeted organized crime.
Popular resistance to the Mafia increased in the early 21st century as business owners increasingly refused to pay the pizzo, a “protection” fee demanded by local crime organizations. The pizzo, which extracted an estimated €200 million per day from Italian businesses, represented a vital revenue stream for the Mafia. The Addiopizzo (“Goodbye, pizzo”) movement coalesced around consumers and businesses who rejected the Mafia’s presence in everyday life, and Italy’s most powerful business association threatened to expel any of its members who paid the pizzo.
Political process
Electoral system
For almost half a century after World War II, Italy’s electoral system was based on proportional representation, a system in which seats in an elected body are awarded to political parties according to the proportion of the total vote that they receive. Between 1993 and 1995, several changes were made by national legislation and popular referenda. Following these changes, on the national level the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate were elected by a combination of proportionality and plurality. Seventy-five percent of the seats in these two chambers were filled from single-member districts by individual candidates who won the largest number of votes in each district. The other 25 percent of the seats were awarded to candidates from party lists on a proportional basis. The number of votes obtained by the winner in single-member districts was fully (for senators) or partially (for deputies) subtracted before allocating proportional seats, thus introducing a further element of proportionality. A new electoral law passed in late 2005 overturned this system by restoring full proportional representation. However, the law also allocated a number of bonus seats in the Chamber of Deputies to the winning coalition—thus guaranteeing a majority for the victors.
In regional elections, voters cast two ballots. The first is cast in a contest for 80 percent of the seats in the regional council, which are awarded on a proportional basis. The second ballot is employed in a plurality vote; the regional coalition that wins a plurality is awarded all the remaining seats as well as the presidency of the regional government. Split voting is allowed.
In provincial elections, only one vote is cast. If a single provincial list wins more than 50 percent of the votes, seats are divided among all the lists according to their proportion of the vote, and the presidency goes to the head of the winning list. Otherwise, a runoff election must take place between the two most successful lists, with the winner taking 60 percent of the seats.
A similar system is employed in municipal elections in cities with more than 15,000 inhabitants. In this case, however, two ballots are cast, one for mayor and one for the council. Split voting is permitted. In smaller cities only one ballot is cast; the winning list is awarded two-thirds of the seats as well as the mayoralty.
Political parties
From the end of World War II until the 1990s, Italy had a multiparty system with two dominant parties, the Christian Democratic Party (Partito della Democrazia Cristiana; DC) and the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano; PCI), and a number of small yet influential parties. The smaller parties ranged from the neofascist Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano; MSI) on the right to the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano; PSI) on the left; a number of small secular parties occupied the center. The DC, in various alliances with smaller parties of the center and left, was the dominant governing party, and the principal opposition parties were the PCI and the MSI.
The postwar party system described above was radically altered by the fall of communism in the Soviet bloc in 1991, by a wave of judicial prosecutions of corrupt officials that involved most Italian political parties, and finally by the electoral reforms of the 1990s. The DC, riven by scandal, was replaced by a much smaller organization, the Italian Popular Party (Partito Popolare Italiano; PPI), which played a diminished role after elections in 1994. By that time three new parties had arisen to dominate the political right and center-right: Forza Italia (FI; loosely translatable as “Go Italy”), an alliance created in 1994 by the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi and dedicated to the principles of the market economy; the Northern League (Lega Nord; LN), formed in 1991, a federalist and fiscal-reform movement with large support in the northern regions; and the National Alliance (Alleanza Nazionale; AN), which succeeded the MSI in 1994 but whose political platform renounced its fascist past. Meanwhile, the PCI remained an important electoral force under a new name, the Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra; PDS), later shortened to the Democrats of the Left (Democratici di Sinistra; DS). Thus, the Italian political spectrum, which had previously been dominated by parties of the center, became polarized between parties of the right and left. The political center was left to be divided by various short-lived multiparty alliances—for example, at the turn of the 21st century, the center-right House of Freedoms and the center-left Olive Tree. In 2007 a new center-left party, known simply as the Democratic Party (Partito Democratico), emerged when the DS merged with the centrist Daisy (Margherita) party. Soon afterward the FI joined with the AN to create the new center-right People of Freedom (Popolo della Libertà; PdL) party. AN leader Gianfranco Fini withdrew from the alliance in 2010 to form the rival center-right Future and Freedom for Italy (Futuro e libertà per l’Italia; FLI) party.
The participation of the citizen
All citizens 18 years and older may vote. The turnout for elections in Italy is high, often reaching well over 80 percent of the electorate for parliamentary elections. Citizens may also subscribe to national referenda or petitions designed to abrogate a law or an executive order; such a petition must be signed by 500,000 members of the electorate or sponsored by five regional councils. Abrogative referenda have been used extensively since the 1970s to make possible a wide range of institutional and civic reforms. Abrogative referenda are provided for with regard to all regional legislation, and some regions have a provision for holding ordinary referenda. The constitution also provides that 50,000 members of the electorate may jointly present a draft bill to parliament.
