The Administrative Reform Trajectory in Italy: Pre-unitarian and 1861–1993

The Italian public administration is paradoxically born before the creation of the Italian State. The model that would be adopted in 1861 by the Kingdom of Italy at its formation was in fact the one introduced in 1853 in the small Kingdom of Sardinia (the Sardinian-Piedmontese matrix of the Italian State). Cavour was the forger of the reform which established the bureaucratic-hierarchical model. Afterwards, the reforms promoted by Crispi and Giolitti between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century constituted the first attempts at change. Giolitti was the leading political figure during the first 15 years of the twentieth century when three fundamental changes occurred: (1) the number of public employees grew from 90,000 to more than 300,000; (2) the southern regions surpassed those in the north as far as the regional origin of the public employees was concerned; (3) the diverse and pluralistic culture gave way to a uniform and monochord culture: the law degree became the standard. The Great War led to a rise of the number of public employees since it gave way to an increasingly incisive role for the State. On the contrary, in its first phase, the fascist regime—which promoted a liberal economic policy—stopped this process. However, in a successive phase (in the 1930s) the fascist regime restarted it and the public sector reached and exceeded 1 million employees. In the meanwhile, both the so-called second bureaucracy (the one of the public bodies created by the State but endowed with autonomy) and the third bureaucracy (the one of the corporations, which the fascist regime introduced as a sort of third way between liberalism and socialism) grew. After the fall of the fascist regime, the Italian bureaucracy continued its growth until it reached the threshold of 4 million employees in the 1980s. Thus, due to the effects of the late twentieth century and early 2000s’ austerity policies, the size of the Italian public sector has decreased: the current number of public employees is indeed around 3,200,000 (including regions and local authorities). The late twentieth-century reforms (especially those promoted by the minister of Public Administration Franco Bassanini) have had less decisive effects than expected in the implementation phase. Indeed, the Italian public administration is still characterized by some hereditary defects: the State public administration (of course not the regional ones) is made up of too many southerners; it is too bureaucratic (in this case even the regions have imitated the State); its personnel is too old, especially as far as senior civil servants are concerned; it is too dominated by a legalistic culture and by a negative variant which is the formalism.