Democrazia di insoddisfatti?

A challenge democracy is affecting concerns the ability to respond to citizens’ needs through decisions and public policies closer to their preferences. The most obvious effect is increasing attitudes of criticism, disappointment and disaffection with democracy, that have characterized and still persist in the Italian political culture. After discussing the concept of dissatisfaction the article will be focused a relevant case in point, the Italian parliamentary democracy, by employing a comparative analysis of attitudes towards democracy, in particular trust in political institutions and satisfaction with the functioning of democracy. Successively, the paper will attempt to understand the different meaning of dissatisfaction emerging during the so called first republic in comparison with the following period, second republic, with a short reconstruction of the trend in dissatisfaction from ‘70s to the last couple of decades. Finally we examine the behavioral consequences of dissatisfaction in order to put forward a number of new propositions to be discussed further