The Politics of Growth Model Management in Italy: A Historical and Comparativist Approach to Populist and Centrist Coalition Building Strategies
The Politics of Growth Model Management in Italy: A Historical and Comparativist Approach to Populist and Centrist Coalition Building Strategies

Summary/Abstract: How can parties in government find an economic policy balance between their representative and governing duties? How are growth coalitions transformed? By looking at the case of Italian centrist and populist governments, covering a period of approximately 10 years—between 2013 and 2022, the paper shows how the structural preconditions—internal and external constraints—of the growth model strongly limit the ability of political leaders to fundamentally alter pre-existing growth coalitions, in the context of a pre-existing crisis of the Italian growth model itself and the dismantling of a previously functional national industrial policy. Our comparative approach, albeit highlighting the populist episode, focuses on: 1) the ‘balancing strategical act’ between factions of capital and segments of labor pursued by centrist governments and 2) the economic legitimacy work that populists do by delivering policies and redistributing resources towards reconfigured growth coalitions “embedding” the growth model into a distinctively populist political project. To sum up, we look at the Italian case study to asses the centrists’ and populists’ capacity for growth coalition building and editing, while avoiding the economic costs incurred, domestically, by confronting the demands of the national growth model and, externally, by the constraints posed by eu membership and bond market access.

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