Italy. The difficult road towards a more effective process of ministerial selection

The aim of this chapter is to measure and to explain the effective magnitude of change in the Italian ministerial recruitment from the consolidation of parliamentary democratization to the collapse of the party system of the so called "first republic" and the establishment of a different type of democratic regime. Following a truly comparative framework, which inspires all the contributions in the volume, the analysis of the Italian case reveals to be rather innovative: besides the classic analysis of the "unwritten rules of ministerial selection" a number of institutional and strategic factors are now considered. The main implication of the study is that the passage from a consensus to a more "majoritarian" democracy seems to be, under the point of view of ministerial selection and de-selection, much more troublesome and somehow controversial.