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A richly-informed new explanation for the fluctuating fortunes of Italy’s colorful Prime Minister
Berlusconi's Italy
Mapping Contemporary Italian Politics
Michael E. Shin and John A. Agnew
Listen to a podcast from UCLA's International Institute with John Agnew and Marc Lazar discussing "Berlusconi's Italy"
"This book presents a novel argument in a succinct manner, offering a new perspective on a big issue: the rise to prominence of Silvio Berlusconi. It adds considerably to our understanding of the Berlusconi phenomenon."
—Martin Bull, University of Salford
Berlusconi's Italy provides a fresh, thoroughly-informed account of how Italy's richest man came to be its political leader. Without dismissing the importance of personalities and political parties, it emphasizes the significance of changes in voting behaviors that led to the rise-and eventual fall-of Silvio Berlusconi, the millionaire media baron who became Prime Minister. Armed with new data and new analytic tools, Michael Shin and John Agnew reveal that regional politics and shifting geographical voting patterns were far more important to Berlusconi’s successes than the widely credited role of the mass media.
Shin and Agnew reject the prevailing orthodoxy about how coalitions are organized and replaced in Italy. Instead, using recently developed methods of spatial analysis, they offer a compelling new argument about contextual re-creation and mutation. They conclude that Berlusconi’s success (and later defeat) can be best understood in geographic terms, and they suggest that geographical analysis has a useful role to play in examining political behavior in Italy and beyond.
Reviews
"A completely new conceptualization of Italian party politics and their reconstitution. It rejects the orthodoxy about how coalitions are replaced and globalized within Italy, and provides a provocative and compelling argument about their con-textual recreation and mutation. This is a fundamental book for those interested in Italian politics."
—Michael Ward, University of Washington
"Berlusconi's Italy is conceptually path breaking. Departing from accounts that focus on the media or the decline of regional subcultures, Shin and Agnew argue that place configurations that shift in time and space have created the kinds of fluid and powerful coalitions that have catapulted Berlusconi to power. This book is a must read not only for specialists in Italian politics and political geographers but for everyone interested in the mutating electoral politics of contemporary Europe."
—Mabel Berezin, Cornell University
About the Author(s)
Michael Shin is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California at Los Angeles.
John Agnew is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author or co-author of Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power (Temple), Place and Politics, The United States in the World Economy, The Geography of the World Economy, Geopolitics, and Place and Politics in Modern Italy, among other titles, as well as the co-editor of American Space/American Place.