In the Labyrinth. State, Governments and the Growth of the Public Debt in Italy in the Middle of 1980s

The ambition of this work is to rethink and present a possible path of historicalinstitutionalinvestigation in relation to and with a critical comparison of solideconomic, political and sociological research into the political causes of rapid increaseof public debt and its ‘instrumentalization’ by coalition governments for the purposesof consensus, in the blocked political-institutional system, as the first Executives in theItalian Republic’s history not led by Christian Democrats (DC) Prime Minister.The reason for the decision to concentrate the analysis on a reduced portion of thatdecade – and therefore chronologically not going past 1988-89, the year of a passage toa different phase for many aspects – responds to the intention of concentrating theanalysis and delving into the sources (archival and institutional sources, but alsoarchives of political parties).Italian State has always lived above its means, with a constant imbalance betweenincome and expenditure and at the same time expanding its distance with respect tosociety (but the debt was paid by social groups that took advantage of it), a process thattriggered off a perennial crisis of representation and strengthened the instability ofrelations between political institutions and society. Moreover, public debt crises, ashistorical research suggests, are always crises of institutional legitimization and requirea redefinition of the ways in which sovereignty and political power are exercised.Thus, the article investigates the impact of the ‘political use’ of public debt by italiangovernments on the relationship between the State and society.