The Development and Institutionalization of Political Science in Italy

Abstract

Italian political science has grown remarkably in the last two decades both in quantity and quality. Such a growth, however, came much later than in other European countries due to a number of cultural and institutional obstacles. The development of the discipline and the timing of such development are seen as the result of interaction of four broad sets of factors. They are: (1) the effort by scholars in the 1960s to establish political science as a distinct field of study; (2) the social and economic development of Italian society, which called for reform and political modernization; (3) the push from the outside, especially the impact of American political science and behaviouralism; and (4) changes in the Italian university system. The structure and degree of institutionalization of the profession in today's Italy are briefly reviewed in the final section.