A Republic of Parties? Constitution-making in Italy through the Lenses of the Constitutional Regime

This chapter’s main objective is to reconstruct the patterns of formation and development of the Italian constitutional order post World-War II. The intention is to track whether there is an ‘Italian’ way to constitution-making and to assess, in comparative constitutional terms, to which family it belongs. In order to provide some background, a methodological engagement with Bruce Ackerman’s work and the American School of development will kick off the chapter. Hence, the basic unit of constitutional regime will be adopted and the focus will be, mostly, on the function of political parties. Then a brief reconstruction of the pre-1948 constitution-making experiences will be provided, with particular attention paid to the pathway of transformation adopted by the Fascist Party. In sections 3 and 4, the constituent phase of the republican constitution and its development in the following decades will be tracked by emphasising the role of political parties. The intention is to prove that this experience was an instantiation of a revolutionary type of constitution-making. In section 5, an hypothesis about the constitutional relevance of recent informal mutation (i.e., non-revolutionary) will be put forward.