Well, I don’t think Italy is a role model we should be following, here, to be brutally honest. The Italian economy is almost stagnant, the country is slated as one of the countries that could possibly collapse the Euro, the government is a joke, corruption runs rampant, bureaucracy is essentially strangling the country, the laws are a mess that make absolutely no sense—even to Italians, there are no jobs for graduates (and part of the recent student anger in Italy is related to this: essentially Italy has no big businesses, firms are mostly lo-tech or manufacturing, and getting a job is mostly a matter of being recommended by a family friend, or knowing somebody on the inside). As a symptom, Italy is currently the only EU country with a net brain-drain of graduates.
Italy has a lot of problems, and many of these are to do with the government not being able to focus on the real issues, due to deadlock (and a lot of time is spent trying to keep coalitions together which could be better spent on sorting the economy out, see the recent confidence vote in December for instance, wherein both sides raced to corrupt as many people as possible from the other), so they focus on minor, piddling little problems (such as introducing €20,000 fines for not registering your home Internet router with the government, for instance), which only increases the bureaucracy and makes life a lot harder than it should be.
Agreed. Surprisingly, research says politicians keep their promises more than the average person believes. I can’t recall a significant manifesto promise which was abandoned after the election because of coalition compromise. Ultimately the small gives way to the large.
The NZ coalitions have been vaguely left and right - like-minded parties can get along.
One aspect the public do not like is that at least one small party has always refused to state which major party they will align with. Thus the uncertainty you refer to. That party is no longer in Parliament…
As for corruption, we’d have to consider the Italian psyche and their history. Oiling the wheels is culturally acceptable in Mediterranean countries, as it is in Asia.
At this point I’ll make a quick plug for New Zealand which (along with Finland) is the least corrupt country in the world.
My riposte is that your timeframe is too short. Go back to 1945 when Italy was a basketcase. Since then they have had 61 governments. Despite the political uncertainty however, Italy has shone economically against the odds and is ranked 7th on GDP among OECD countries.
I acknowledge Italy currently has problems but so does Greece, Spain, Portugal, Iceland, France and I imagine to a lesser extent, the UK. Certainly your currency has dropped markedly as has the Euro.
Your point regarding wasted effort on political machinations is well made but IMHO that occurs almost universally, whatever the system. Imagine the USA where you can pay a Congressman to push a specific pork-barrow. It is almost beyond my comprehension. Morally and ethically wrong.
I don’t follow this. To me the manifesto pledges are all important. For example, in this country the LibDems pledged not to raise tuition fees: they have reneged on those promises since joining the coalition. I have no idea how many people voted for them primarily because of that pledge, but *neither do they *. So if what I have quoted above means that the pledges ditched are not significant, then you would need to explain who judges that significance. You may consider a pledge to be “small”, but I may differ. What you have said does not so far reassure me at all
If your left wing parties broadly agree then you have a very different political landscape than exists here. Put any two lefties in a room and get three policies on any issue you care to mention …
More seriously, it may well be that one can work out what one will get by looking at the overlap between manifesto pledges from different parties who will agree to ally: but there will not be perfect overlap or they wouldn’t be different parties in the first place. It still does not mean that what is in the manifesto will still be there after the coalition is formed. I do not see how this deals with the problem of only knowing what you will get after the election rather than before
Perhaps it is cultural. But there remains the possibility that it is fostered by the system adopted. One thing I am very aware of is that things take much longer to show their full effect than we are apt to imagine. As I understand what you are saying the PR system in NZ is fairly new. It is therefore too soon to tell what effect, if any, it might have on your currently uncorrupt culture. Italy appears to be a special case and it would be interesting to find whether corruption is more widespread in PR countries generally. Sadly I do not know anything about that not do I know how to find out. I don’t even know what system Finland has: nor whether the UK is less corrupt than, say Belgium. Do you have information about the interplay between systems and corruption in the western world?
