Abstract

In the latest decades, the «Will it last?» question about parliamentary governments has received a growing attention by political scientists. However, only a few studies focus on the Italian case, and scholars have not found a satisfactory interpretation for the huge differences characterizing the transition from the First to the Second Italian Republic yet. In this work, I assume that this interpretation deals with the linkages between institutional opportunities and constraints, parties' power relations and their strategic behaviour. This, in turn, depends on the «shadow of the past» characterizing each party decision and on future expectations that those parties rationally shape. The more these opportunities and constraints set up a condition in which majority parties perceive themselves as ruling the country only temporary, the more those parties are stimulated not to modify that (fickle) equilibrium. In other words, today more than before, parties sustaining governments have the incentive to avoid crises whose outcomes are more uncertain than they used to be in the past.