Testing Italian Democracy

The terms ‘crisis’ and ‘anomaly’ are usually used by international and Italian Political Science, Sociology and History to qualify the state of democracy in Italian Republic for the past as for the present. In this contribution, the author does a study of these notions of ‘crisis’ and ‘anomaly’, then studies the Political Science and Historical literature about the deep change of political system and political parties since the 1990s. Finally, the article gives a general analytical frame-work for the present Italian politics. Instead of considering Italy as an anomaly, the idea is to think the political mutations of this country as a kind of ‘laboratory’ of a general change of European democracies