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 historical-institutional investigation in relation to and with a critical comparison of solid economic, political and sociological research into the political causes of rapid increase of public debt and its ‘instrumentalization’ by coalition governments for the purposes of consensus, in the blocked political-institutional system, as the first Executives in the Italian 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 that decade – and therefore chronologically not going past 1988-89, the year of a passage to a different phase for many aspects – responds to the intention of concentrating the analysis and delving into the sources (archival and institutional sources, but also archives of political parties). Italian State has always lived above its means, with a constant imbalance between income and expenditure and at the same time expanding its distance with respect to society (but the debt was paid by social groups that took advantage of it), a process that triggered off a perennial crisis of representation and strengthened the instability of relations between political institutions and society. Moreover, public debt crises, as historical research suggests, are always crises of institutional legitimization and require a 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 italian governments on the relationship between the State and society. Classification JEL : H53, H7, N00