The dissatisfied society: The roots of political change in Italy.

Since early 1990s in Italy there has been a major change in the party system. Some of the explanations that are often mentioned, such as corruption, the April 1993 referendum, the new electoral laws, or the secularization of the society and the economic crisis, are important aspects of a complex funnel of causality. Together, however, they do not satisfactorily explain the change. Thus, we identify an idiosyncratic factor, the chronic, widespread dissatisfaction, that existed since the end of the 1940s, and explore the reasons why this dissatisfaction caused change only in the 1990s. The main explanations we suggest provide the basis for some speculations on changes in an Italian democracy that is still in a phase of transformation in the mid-1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]