The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands it and Campaigning Undermines it

SUMMARY

This article aims to reconstruct the debates that developed in the Italian Constituent Assembly, 1946–47, concerning two important issues: the form of the Italian government and the structure of the Italian Parliament. These issues are placed in the historical and chronological context whereby the text of the Italian Constitution was written and enacted between 2 June 1946 and 22 December 1947 (the date of enactment). This Italian Constitution is still in force today. These two themes are of contemporary relevance because the choices of Italian constituents, based on the nature of parliamentary government and symmetrical bicameralism, are still at the centre of current political debate about institutional reform in Italy. These historical debates are reconstructed through consideration and analysis of the official records of the Italian Constituent Assembly, the contemporary literature of the period and recent historiography.