Podcast: "The budget is again unmanageable"
Alice Cavalieri on sausages, laws and Italy's government finances
“The man who wishes to keep his respect for sausages and laws should not see how either is made” - attributed to Otto von Bismarck by Claudius Johnson, 1933.
European governments are only now emerging from 15 years of on-again, off-again crises that upended their budgetary positions. From close to balance in 2008, the aggregate budget deficit for governments using the euro is now 3% of output while public debt is up from 66% to 90%.
In Italy, these "processes happened more forcefully", understates Alice Cavalieri in Italian Budgeting Policy: Between Punctuations and Incrementalism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023). Since 2008, Italy's primary account excluding interest payments has turned from a substantial surplus to a deficit while public debt surged from 100% to 140% of output. At the same time, politics have fragmented – leading to the formation of seven governments in ten years – and, for 15 months in 2018-2019, Western Europe’s first populists-only administration.
Using punctuated equilibrium theory, which assumes that systems go through extended stasis until jolted into radical change, Cavalieri examines three decades of Italian budget-making and the shift in power from the parliament to the executive. “The series of reforms that Italy implemented from the Nineties did not achieve the expected outcome of centralisation and rationalisation of the decisions but ended up producing the opposite outcomes,” she tells me. “The result now is that the budget is again unmanageable even for strong majorities and not because of the parliament but because of the majority itself”.
Listen to the podcast on …
New Books Network
Apple
Spotify
Alice Cavalieri is a research fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Trieste. Before that, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Turin after obtaining her PhD at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa.
For my Writers’ Writers tip sheet, she chose Political Recruitment: Gender, Race and Class in the British Parliament by Pippa Norris and Joni Lovenduski (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (Virago, 1987).