Introduction

The focus of this and of the following two chapters is on the structures and institutions of government: Parliament and the executive; the bureaucracy; sub-national government structures; the international and supra-national organisations of which Italy is a member. These institutions lie at the core of the policy-making process which is itself ‘the pivotal stage of the political process’ (Almond and Bingham Powell, Jr, 1992: 91). Policy-making is ‘the pivotal stage of the political process’ in the sense that it is the link which connects the input of demands from political parties, pressure groups and so forth, to political outputs in the form of policies designed to respond to and to shape such demands. If policy-making is ‘the pivotal stage of the political process’, then government institutions ‘lie at the core of’ policy-making. They do so in the sense that in most societies they are the basic structures through which policy is made. In describing how these structures work and are related to each other, we shall highlight what is distinctive about them as compared to recognisably similar structures in other countries. Central to this will be the attempt to identify the actual as opposed to the formal locus (or loci) of power over policy-making in the Italian system. Before doing this, however, we begin by spelling out the basic features of the Italian Constitution; for if constitutions can be defined as sets of rules specifying how the political process is to be carried on, then they define what government structures exist in the first place.