Suchergebnisse

This book is an examination of the nature of the governments of towns and cities, great and small, in Renaissance Italy, and of why oligarchic regimes were becoming increasingly prevalent. Themes and questions arising from a case-study of the dramatic changes in the government of fifteenth-century Siena form the basis for the analysis of popular government and oligarchy throughout Italy, from Piedmont and the Veneto to Sicily, and of how they were shaped by social change, institutional developments and external threats and pressures, especially war. In a field dominated by local studies, this comparative approach provides a fresh understanding of the important problem of how and why broadly-based governments were losing ground to oligarchy throughout Italy

''Note to official Italian publications'':p.143-144. ; Bibl.p.145-151. ; Mode of access: Internet.

What are the political implications of government scandals? This article examines the impact of political scandals on the popularity of the Italian government. The literature on scandals shows that there is a strong relationship between scandals and the popularity of individual politicians and government leaders. Yet, the question of how scandals influence support for governments remains open. Exploring the case of Italy through the use of different data series, the article shows how sex and economic scandals have affected government popularity in 2005-2010

The constitutional and legislative reforms of the last decade have created some important tensions in the regional and local systems. One first tension derives from the multiple relationships between the different components of the national government. At the same time, the autonomy of the regions and local governments has been growing; the tools available to the central government for guiding the periphery are being transformed; the spaces for the cooperation between the regions, local governments and the State are being expanded; an unprecedented number of conflicts between the regions and the State are coming before the Constitutional Court; the much-hyped decentralization has been realized only in part. Another tension has been created by the resistance of central and local governments to the implementation of the reforms: for the central government institutions, this is demonstrated by the failure of decentralization policies; for the peripheral institutions. These resistances hinder innovation, but do not block it altogether: among other things, local governments have found alternative and more flexible forms of aggregation; the decentralization that has been implemented, though much less than that announced, has still significantly altered the functional identity of the regions and local governments in just a few years; the political and administrative organization has experienced important changes. There is, finally, a tension between the essential features of the constitutional reform and the concrete developments in the local and regional systems. The constitutional model is based on a two-fold principle of separation: the separation of areas of legislative competences by subject-matter and the separation of the types of administrative functions.

Italian government has demonstrated its sensitivity towards innovation by including amodernisation of the country public administration through the application of new ICT technologies amongits political programme priorities. In this article are discussed Italian strategies for the development of theInformation Society, giving especially attention to the development of e-Government and to the learning ofpublic servants, citizens and the general public.